Daydreaming

I had a delicious nap yesterday while listening to some YouTube video of “Silent Hill ambient”, a genre born on the Internet that consists of remixing/recycling music from the Silent Hill video games over and over again.

The track – at least one of its sequences, since the whole thing lasts four hours – had something particularly brilliant about it, insofar as beneath the main layer, which alternated two or three interminable notes, you could hear, faintly, high-pitched melodies, much faster, like arabesques of flutes a little out of tune and far away; like a world barely perceptible but very present, almost tangible, behind this veil of ambient layers in the foreground.

I imagined, half-dreaming, a video game with primitive graphics, let's say a la Daggerfall, but in entirely purple tones; a first-person game where you'd wander through a snowy country landscape, encountering strange scenes, static NPCs, motionless or busy with mysterious things, perhaps some kind of ritual, and who'd say sybillinous, poetic things to the player. Music would have been absolutely front and center, not as a mere ambient element, but as a fundamental part of the world being explored – for example, certain sounds, certain melodies, would have been as if emitted by this or that element of the scenery (a sacred tree, a person, etc.) and their sound volume in the overall mix, proportional to the player's proximity to them. A poetic and aesthetic experience rather than a playful one.

Long before I heard about Daggerfall and had this semi-awake dream, I used to have these kind of wintry, purple visions, when I was still almost a teenager, listening to the Kirke Aske demo, for example. It seems to be a kind of archetype with me, a mental landscape probably as old as I am.