Something I should clarify from my previous post is that by all accounts, when it came time for the people at the Sega Multimedia Studio to do sound programming for the Genesis, it was, as best as I can tell, primarily David Javelosa for whom that role fell. Spencer Nilsen might have composed music for the Ecco games, but I'm not aware of any cases of him having actually programmed that music into the game himself, whereas Javelosa has claimed credit for doing so.
As a result, when I think about this project in general, I think of this as primarily being one replicating aspects of the style of Javelosa maybe a little more than Nilsen, despite Javelosa not actually having contributed to the game's soundtrack otherwise. Certainly between the two composers of the soundtrack I would imagine that any music being made would be under the direction of Nilsen (or perhaps based on his own original compositions) where that might not be as true for Sterling, who was presumably only working for Sega under a short-term contract.
I mention this because I consider it to be necessary context for the next track in the game, Tidal Tempest.
The tracks: present, good future, and bad future
Compared to the last two entries, there's not as much in common between the tracks. The two future tracks emphasize an arpeggio (sus4 chords in the good future, minor 7th chords in the bad future), but don't have a lot in common with the present music. The bassline for the present and good future is a little similar, but this one of a few tracks where the various time zones don't actually have a ton in common structurally outside of general gestures toward a common mood. In fact, since the present track has such a strong swing feel and the future tracks don't, it stands out a fair bit on that alone.
As a result, my general approach was to adapt loosely as possible -- going at most for trying to achieve a certain mood. As a result, the finished product maybe hews a bit more toward the music from Masque than the tracks from the game, but mad as I may be my madness still has a method to it, and I did it by looking to the other work that the team did. Specifically, a song for a water level from Sega Multimedia Studio naturally has me gravitating toward ideas from Ecco the Dolphin, since that would have been the other big project Spencer Nilsen and David Javelosa would have worked on. That game and its sequel have music that is slower, more built around harmonic structures than a specific melody to be ambient and atmospheric. Thinking in terms of a song that might have been composed as an early track for the game or as a demo for the potential direction to take the sound but was not part of the final product, re-used here.
Naturally we also want to think about Sonic 1's analogous level, Labyrinth Zone. There's a koto-like instrument that does most of the melody, but a lot of the rest of the track is pretty sparse, mostly bass and percussion with occasional horn hits and a string pad sort of sound. A song that is almost all melody seems at-odds with the direction I want to take the stage's music, but it might help to focus on the way that the existing past track interprets the melody of the chorus. Here's SCD past, and here's Sonic 1. What was previously a song with a bit of similarity to Best of My Love is, adapted into Sonic CD, a pentatonic minor riff instead. In fact, because the past track and the future tracks both do a shuttle loop between the root and the flat-seventh chord, they fit in stylistically a lot better than any of the other past tracks in the game. There's a mashup between the US and Japanese soundtracks for this song that winds up working fairly well because once you pitch-match everything, the chord structures are all pretty similar, and a bunch of the songs share a tempo.
As for how Masque fits into the equation, I thought that the most appropriate track for this stage would be Telegram to Monica. This one was penned by Denny Newman, who contributed lead vocals and bass to this track and backing vocals to other tracks on the album. (While he only received credit as part of the band for this album, he also penned a previous song for MMEB, Lies (Through the 80s) which was the sublime opener of their 1980 album Chance.) It's melancholy, it's slower, it uses a lot of string pads, and most importantly the instrumental break (based on the 'when there is no reply' pre-chorus) is similar to what the existing past track does to call back to Labyrinth. While not what got me into thinking about making this project, it was the moment that I decided that actually doing so would, in fact, work. And before I get carried away, here's Telegram to Monica:
I decded to start the song from the aforementioned instrumental break not just because it's the part that most strongly resembles the Sonic material, but also because if I start from there, I can have a similar opening that's mostly just bass, percussion, and an arpeggio, similar to the way the Sonic tracks all open. This becomes the focal point (and, in fact, is more directly quoted in the pre-chorus, partly to emphasize it, and also because it allows me to copy and paste).
Another note is that that section is all just over a D7 chord, so the outline of it resembles the future track's opening arpeggios; the pads are walking up from the fifth (A) to the seventh (C), and that's similar to what the future tracks are doing in their chord outlines. It also just so happens to be the chord (same key and everything!) that is the bulk of the bridge at about 54 seconds in the present track, so there's a lot of coherence with this specific section of the song that can help tie all of the time zones together.
With all that context, I think we can link the final piece now:
Because of the association I'd given this track with Ecco, I really wanted to play up the parts of the track that sounded like sonar sweeps/pings. Some sort of radio interference like that is the kind of idea for the sort of stereo scatter effect on the chords in the intro and break section. Obviously neither that nor the synth percussion sounds much like real sonar sweeps would, but this is meant to be a song and not an 8 hour submarine noise sound effect video; it's fairly intentionally abstract.
The marimba is very explicitly inspired by Ecco, in particular the vents and island zone. Again, the idea was a song that might sound like a demo before either of these tracks were made, and that would fit in next to them and feel consistent. It helps that Island Zone's bass sounds just a little bit like what's going on in Telegram to Monica.
By the way, the bass and marimba samples came from freesound.com, and I should probably source them -- here's the link to the bass, licensed under CC+ sampling attribution license, and here's the marimba under CC0.
The little guitar arpeggio going on has some resemblance to the bad future's atmospheric pad arpeggios, especially at the end of the stanza of the verse (both descend from an E minor chord starting at E to go back to the start).
The one real throughline between all of the tracks is possibly the guitar lick that you can hear panned left in the intro of the present. In the version I linked, it becomes more prominent near the end before the track loops -- that version is specifically from the mobile/2011 remastered release, which recuts the tracks to loop with fewer gaps/fades when possible, and takes that portion from the remix on the Sonic the Hedgehog Boom soundtrack CD. You can hear a similar guitar lick in the Good Future when the trumpet-synths are playing with a stereo chorus effect, and in the bad future, a similar lick is played in the bass. It's a syncopated line that alternates from a starting note and the note a step down, and then ends descended by a fourth from it; in both present and good future it's G-F G-F G-F-D. While I add a few notes to this lick to fill more space (and, of course, because it's more similar to the Masque inspiration), this is the basic outline of the melody I've used, which goes D C-D-C E-F# E-C-B-A. The basic outline of the motif (shifted up from G to D) is clearly still there, but played about half as fast as in the other tracks. Again, quite possibly the only thing that's really consistent between the various time zones in the original, which is part of why it's so prominent here.
The final section after the chorus is an attempt to tie that instrumental break in Telegram and the B-section in Labyrinth. I've said most of what I have to say on that, but want to point out that again as what the idea
Truth be told, I wasn't thinking of a Chaotix track at all when I made this, but I suppose it's a bit like Door Into Summer, where the bridge section at :22 in resembles our big-ol-point-of-emphasis bridge section.
This one has been especially difficult to talk about because it felt less like it was shaped by any sort of conscious process on my part so much as it was pulled from the ether; most of my attempts to impose structure on it after the fact, barring the chord progression and the horn lick in the bridge being taken, of course, almost verbatim from Telegram. That's the main reason why this post took so long -- how do I actually manage to tease out the process behind this one when even I barely have an idea what I did here?
I think ultimately if there is a lesson for creative projects it's that no matter how concrete your inspiration, generally the process of creating a cohesive work is a non-linear process, and involves a lot of fucking around until you figure out something that does seem to work. Making stuff is kinda weird, when you think about it.
Daytime rechost!