One of the fun things about Masque and the process went into making it is that compared to nearly every other album by the band, it's quite possibly the one with the least transparency into its making. It got a last-minute track listing change with some additions, causing several songs to be cut down significantly from their in-progress versions. Aside from the use of the SY-77 for a trumpet synth and probably use of the Fairlight, I don't know much about what synthesizers were used in the process. The album was produced by both Mann and Steve Forward, who had also done production work on their previous album Criminal Tango. Aside from a core group of Manfred Mann (synths, keyboards, etc.), Mick Rogers (guitar, vocals), and John Lingwood (drums), the album relied a lot on session musicians and people who weren't long-term band members; neither Maggie Ryder (vocals), who sang on the album track that's relevant to this post, nor Denny Newman (vocals and bass) from last post stuck around with the band. For that matter, Masque had no sort of promotional tour at all, just a couple videos produced for Germany. Interviews about the album at the time are scarce, whereas the previous album got several. It's almost a non-entity, which is a shame because I do think that it's quite good, if completely outside of what anyone who'd been listening to MMEB for the past decade prior would have likely expected, if only because of how mellow it tends to all be.
I think part of this is due to the fact that the band's record label at the time, Virgin, simply had no idea how to sell the band. With Criminal Tango they mostly tried, but with a poppy American sound as its focus and no American distributor, the album did OK for a little while (charting in Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Australia) but mostly failed to garner long-term attention. I would not be surprised to find the album had no fanfare and was just pushed quietly out to market, with Virgin fearing a lack of return on investment compounded by the lack of congruency in style to the discography up until that point. Virgin would have some publishing stake in albums after that point, but the next album, a decade later, would be published most regions by The Grapevine Label which would later spin off into Cohesion/Creature Music, which appears to publish MMEB music near exclusively.
This is not the only incident of a band I'm familiar with signing with Virgin and having issues with their music being promoted. A decade later, a certain Japanese band would sign with them to have some of their music sold in America. They had just left their previous label, Sony Music, who they had a strained relationship with. While the band might have had name recognition with a certain youth cohort, those would have probably been (like me!) a bit too young in 1996-97 to buy their own music, and probably not interested in the sound that they had made a name for themselves with. They were pushed to make a more trendy sound incorporating American hip-hop that alienated their older fanbase in Japan, and which Americans didn't go for.
This was (if you didn't guess from context) Dreams Come True, whose bassist, Masato Nakamura, is likely instantly recognizable to the 5 or so of you who are still reading these posts -- yep, that's the guy who composed the music to Sonic 1 and 2. The album in question, Sing or Die, is notable because it's got one track that's an English language song whose lyrics were set to a rather recognizable tune:
Again, while it's very recognizable what the source of the tune is, that's an arrangement that is clearly not music for the 5-year-old sitting in front of the TV collecting those rings and boppin those robots. Much too slow, and much too sappy -- not to get down on it too hard; the song hits differently as a happily married man in his mid-30s.
I'm bringing this all up because the stage we're talking about today is the one from Sonic CD that doesn't really match up with a stage from Sonic 1, and I feel like I have to come up with some kind of connection here between the disparate components of this project for each post, however spurious. And on that note we really should start talking about that music, because it's the reason why we're here.
Present, Good Future, and Bad Future.
You'll notice that while the Good Future and Bad Future are almost identical, neither has much of anything in common with the Present track. The future tracks are in a standard 4/4 time but the present is in 6/4. Between the loose similarity between present and future and the fact that there's no S1 track to pattern after, the clear answer to me is to be willing to be kinda loose and just screw around, rather than try to mimic much in the way of any specific source.
One influence, however, is the Sega CD Bios, version 1. This was another track done by David Javelosa, and he's got an extended remix that came out near the end of 2022 which appears to take inspiration from the old Sega Multimedia Studio internal demo that's since been leaked to the public. That's a fanfare, and I'm thinking along similar lines: strings and timpanis, fanfares and crescendos.
While it's a bit restrained compared to what I want to do, I felt that there was a fairly obvious choice for this track in mood in Masque, specifically the cover of Start by The Jam, titled here as What You Give Is What You Get. For the Earth Band, this was their second Jam cover in as many albums; Criminal Tango, the previous release, opened with a Springsteen-inspired cover of Going Underground. Paul Weller enjoyed the song enough to give them the opportunity to cover this one, and it's the only other time the band has covered a song by them.
It's a wildly different interpretation of the original song, which almost sounds like a two-tone song with its insistent bass riff. I bring this up because it's the first tune that we've seen here that wasn't either written by someone in the band (i.e., Telegram to Monica) or considered a standard (Billie's Bounce and Joybringer). Given The Jam's rather strong Beatles influences, I guess you could call that a Taxman remake.
and if you think that joke's bad you should have seen the first draft's 'sonic jam' pun
The song went #1 in the UK, and was their second song to do so after, yeah, Going Underground (their original recording, not the Earth Band cover). The lesson here is obvious: nothing bad can possibly happen if you steal riffs from your influences shamelessly.
The Earth Band cover is interesting because while it's much mellower, it's also very heavily sequenced itself. Almost everything in it appears to be sequenced, and as a result the the song comes across with having a very mechanical feel -- appropriate for a stage filled with conveyor belts and mining apparatuses.
By the way, the album cut was heavily edited from its original mix, which included more of Frank Mead's saxophone solo, returned to the chorus, and then transitioned into what became a second track on the album, titled Planets Schmanets. I'm sharing it because even if it's not directly influencing the track, it's interesting, because this is to me, someone who had Windows 95 deeply imprinted on him concurrently with Sonic CD, the unmistakable sound of computers waking up:
The last piece of the puzzle for me was to try to make the melody sound like a synth (and, later, vocal) line taken from the extended/expanded version of the present's track from Sonic the Hedehog Boom, cued up at 1:07 or so here, to try to give it a bit more individuality than just a copy of WYGIWYG. The bells which play out the melody in the good future play something similar, so it's a good starting point for a melody that feels consistent with the rest of the time zones.
This is actually something I only really did once I was working on this post -- before that, I had instead just decided to outline the notes of the original melody. I was never fully satisfied with that, and decided to change to this because, well, there's more interpretation involved. The older melody was just too basic for me, though you can hear it on the original gameplay video (and note that I have not edited any of the music being used in the mods on gamebanana yet either -- the older melody is there as well). This is, in a sense, new.
All that said, here's the track:
The string riff has been expanded into two tracks, meant to sound just a little more like the synth arpeggios happening in the future tracks. Again, I'm trying to make things sound as mechanical as possible, keeping time like melodic percussion. The prechorus (i.e., around 29 seconds in) is meant to also sound like the last section of the future track, though it's subtle, mainly in the descending notes in the pizzicato string melody and the bell that echoes it. Lastly, the bridge around 1:35 is meant to sound loosely like the B-section of the present track (where the Sonic the Hedgehog Boom version is cued to start). Again, I want to try to avoid copying licks from the Sonic tracks too closely, as the song ought to have its own identity (even if that's mostly been copied from the Masque track).
Other than that there's not too much to say. There isn't as broad a set of ideas to copy from, and the track mostly just kinda speaks for itself I think.
Lastly, though it wasn't part of my conscious process, there's a bit of similarity to Chaotix's Tachy Touch, isn't there? Just a happy little concidence, as it's the song I most easily forget about being in the soundtrack that isn't, say, a short stinger at the end of an event.
I think that just about covers all the bases.