While some performances aim to have listeners hear the rosin singing off a violin bow, there aren’t many that can make you feel the concave, smooth, and plasticy feel of the ‘A’ button on an NES controller.
“Omikronian” is the debut EP from 0MEGAVIZI0N, a new project by composers Peter Stopschinski and Jimmy Burdine. Stopschinski and Burdine are longtime friends and collaborators, also known for the projects of their ongoing Austinite band, Brown Whörnet.
“Omikronian” tells the story of a protagonist named Pants Fad as they “travel through time and space to save the future from certain doom brought forth by an evil thaumaturgist from Omikronia.” The 8-bit-styled album is not a video game soundtrack, but is instead the score and foley of a fictional video game being played in real (and musically stylized) time — level scores are tallied, Pants Fad runs and jump, enemies attack, and Boss Battles emerge.
The initial sketches of the EP were first drafted in the lulls between Stopschinski and Burdine’s work on the Brown Whörnet album “Doctor Dickle.” Unlike other Brown Whörnet endeavors, the music is not presented as band material, but instead as coming from a fictional alternate-dimension retro gaming device called the 0MEGAVIZI0N.
“It’s not a purist 8-bit album, it’s more inspired by retro 80s video game music. In six months time we probably got the foundation for enough songs where we said, ‘Lets stop making songs and start refining them.’ It took lots of passes of really thinning out the material to get it back to that core sound that we were trying to achieve.” says Burdine.
“We tried to keep it lean in the beginning, but that’s not what we’re good at — we’re good at going crazy.”
Although the sound of the album has a foot in the realm of the NES or Atari-like heyday of waveform music, the nostalgia is brilliantly challenged in songs such as “On the Third Plane,” where the attack and ability of bass synth voices are something that 20th century gaming systems could have never produced.
The inclusion of gaming-idiomatic loops with newer-sounding instrumentals creates a melange of retro and impossibly futuristic noises that is truly worthy of the Burdine and Stopschinksi’s moniker of 0MEGAVISION, a game console that never happened.
Separating “Omikronian” from other 8-bit inspired groups and albums is its inclusion of the element of player “performance,” in its pieces. Just as important as any compositional material, nearly all of the songs include musical sound effects that would occur if you were playing the fictional game yourself, such as the character Pants Fad earning points, jumping, or dying.
These sounds are layered over the main score of the piece, creating sporadic but impossibly harmonious noise. The game sounds were curated by Stopschinski and Burdine, but were added (or ‘played’) by their Brown Whörnet bandmate and Tyler Harwood.
“Sometimes in opera there’s violins playing the main melody and the singers doing sort of a coloratura, freeform on top,” says Stopschinski
“While you’re playing a game, you’re not just in rhythm and finding all the cool space to do an action: you’re just doing actions. We wanted that randomness as well, that non-sculpted quality to be the very top layer. I think that was best done by outsourcing it, because Jimmy and I had such a deep knowledge of what the songs sounded like.”
After receiving Harwood’s contributions, 0MEGAVIS0N would whittle down the material to fit with the whole of the piece and album. “Like Brown Whörnet, I don’t think anything over premeditated, it’s more let’s just start recording and see what happens,” says Burdine.
“When we gave it to Tyler we were very loose, but we would say here’s 3 sounds for you to use if you want, and then here’s a 4th sound you can use and you can also use some of your others…but then you can’t use some. He would give us the files, and then we would continue with our Brown Whörnet-style of editing and sculpting and refining and we were satisfied.”
In creating a plane of player-esque sounds for each piece, 0MEGAVIS0N simultaneously delivers both the aesthetic design of a musical composition and an aural recreation of the real-time skill and even panic that can be felt when playing a video game.
During Omikronian’s finale, “Pants Fad Departs,” the game sounds are aggressively executed alongside the spiraling and growing thematic material, which creates a cascading event reminiscent of your most dry mouthed, sweat-caked-controller experiences playing video games. If listeners reach out to 0megavisi0n via their bandcamp page, they will even allow listeners to “play” their own version of “Omnikronian” by sending the raw files of base songs and game sound effects.
“Omnikronian” is classic, yet experimental — chaotic, yet beautiful. It’s both a brilliantly designed reminiscence of gaming and an unpredictable musical performance piece. Although it is easy enough for 8-bit influenced projects to fall into strictly sentimental tropes, “Omnikronian” effortlessly adds originality and bite to the sweetness of gaming nostalgia.
“All music was our influence, good and bad, and so this was just infused into our DNA for it to come out naturally,” Burdine says.
Stopschinksi reasons that “we were having the fun of playing those games, that memory of fun while we were making the album. When I listen to it, I can hear all that.”
“Some of our other music is really intense and noisy and grindy, but this really comes across as, I don’t know, happy!”
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March 24, 2021 at 10:00PM
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