Michael V Flores Music

Movie Medley

2011-09-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Featuring themes by Klaus Doldinger, Jerry Goldsmith, Queen, and Brad Fiedel from The NeverEnding Story, Alien, Flash Gordon, and The Terminator respectively.

Here’s a neat one for the movie lover. I had the idea to round up some of my favorite “haunting” movie themes, toss them up along with some magic beans, ray guns, and polished glass, and see what came down. Strangely enough, of the thirteen I had thought to give my own treatment, only six made it into the final recording. I’m thinking maybe the rest will come together in a sequel to this one. Who knows?

In the meantime, enjoy!

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Mi Sueño Feliz

2011-08-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

Another original composition by me!

If I’d had a genuine mariachi band at my disposal, I might’ve had this music recorded back in 2004 when it was composed. Alas, it took many years to figure out how exactly I should achieve the sound I wanted without a mariachi band at my beck and call. Luckily, good things come to those who wait and/or look hard enough for the answers. In this case, the answers involved buying and learning new software, happening upon the famous and anonymously constructed “trumpet3” soundfont, and generally getting extra creative in the production department. But, at last, this music is now published for the world to hear seven years later in 2011.

As troublesome as recording this music has been, the creative process was a dream; literally! I dreamt of imagery featuring a bright and sunny bedroom with a large candy-cane standing beside a big blue bed and a pink haired Norfin Troll slowly ascending and revolving around the candy-cane along its red spiraling stripe. There was a kind of grace to the way it moved, and this bizarre scene was set to the main tune of this song. The arrangement is difficult to remember, but I believe it was somewhere between classical chamber orchestra and Brian Eno soundscape. Somehow, the combination of this music and the calm, cheerful visuals was enough to help the dream to remain in my memory as so many dreams don’t. When I woke up, I immediately began humming the tune to ensure I didn’t forget it and then made my way to the keyboard and began to play. I came up with the intro music later and that, thankfully, came easily enough. The two parts really wrote themselves. Thanks, brain!

I’d always wanted to write music for a mariachi band since I enjoy the sound, and I thought this particular tune would lend itself well to the style. I won’t lie, I love how this song ended up. And if I ever have the opportunity to hear it performed by a real mariachi band in whatever configuration, I will be an extremely happy man.

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Number One

2010-06-25T00:34:00.000-07:00

composed by Michael V. Flores, Jerry Goldsmith, and feat. David Tristan Birkin and Jonathan Frakes

This jokety joke of a "song" was created as a companion piece to Headexplodie's blog post as well as to make her laugh. Maybe you'll laugh?

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El Paso Drive

2010-04-18T00:31:00.000-07:00

Another original composition by me!

Equal parts soft and abrasive. The music here was mostly thought up something like fourteen years ago (1996ish), and only recently elaborated on and finished. Never throw out those ideas, folks! Also, the title comes from a somewhat visceral set of memories from even further back in my life to 1988 when I went on a road trip with my family from San Antonio, Texas, to Disneyland, California. Along the way, we passed through El Paso approaching dusk. Somehow, something in this music brings the view of the desert and sky through those van windows back into my brain. This happened when I first came up with the music those years ago, and happens still. Familiar smells can abruptly hurtle a person back to another point in their life, and I suppose music composed nearly a decade after an event can, without the intent to even do so, link one's mind in the same way, too. I wish I understood how that works. But, hey, it's a neat way to remember something that I have no photos of so that's nice.

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A Quiet Spot

2010-03-17T00:51:00.000-07:00

Another original composition by me!

Continuing along on the minimalism track, this is music which to me is very sweet and personal. While both playing and listening, I’m reminded of the important moments in my life when I have enjoyed a pleasant meal with someone I care very much about. An afternoon in the park here, a morning out back in the yard there, or just some time on the couch all made a hundred times more satisfying when kicked up to the next level with friendship. The sentimentality is overwhelming, I know, so here’s a side-note to bring us back down. The working title for this piece was “nostrils.”

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4-18-10 Update!
For your added pleasure, two more versions! One entirely piano transcription, and the other having a bit of Gershon Kingsley thrown in for good measure.

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Haiku

2009-12-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

Another original composition by me!

This newest bit of music is an original in which I play as honestly and simply as possible. Though there’s little to count in this piece that corresponds with the famous rules of haiku writing, I think the changes in intensity of how and when the music flows and its symmetrical qualities resemble the form quite well enough. Submitted for your approval are two versions to satisfy different tastes.

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More than a paint job

2009-03-12T01:23:00.000-07:00

With many thanks to Headexplodie, she whose numerous talents thankfully include webmasterizering for me, I present to the world a newer, fresher, sleeker, and friendlier repository of my, Michael V. Flores’s, music. It’s a new format for a new URL and I hope all of this newness is welcomed and enjoyed by all. And though the look may have changed, be assured, dear reader, that I shall post new music with the same furious frequency as ever (map it out on a calendar if you’d like). Please update your bookmarks and/or RSS feeds while I continue to work out new ideas.

Simply Supernova

2008-11-20T11:42:00.000-08:00

Another original composition by me!

This was an experiment in form since, normally, my music tends to be sort of without form. Erik Satie was accused of composing mostly formless and thus "pointless" music for most of his life, and he responded to his critics by writing his “Mouvements En Forme De Poire” or “Movements In the Form of a Pear.” But then he also took this criticism to heart and enrolled in music school as an old man to learn once and for all how to write “proper” music. Likewise, although I haven’t (for the most part) considered form to be very important in my own music, I am not completely disinterested in it.

Simply Supernova is made up of a few old ideas I had never been able to do much with. I thought the main bit, the relaxing arpeggiated stuff, might one day be developed into something long and carefully crafted with many changes and clever parts, but I never could hear in my imagination what those parts would sound like. Eventually, I decided that even being short and simple, it was still good enough to me not to waste so I plugged it into a formula resembling rounded binary form and filled in the rest. That works out to something like Intro>A>A2>Bridge>B>B2>Bridge>B3>1/2A>Outro

One of my favorite songs ever, “Innuendo” by Queen, uses something like that to string all of its crazy parts together. I thought such a thing could be a great tool for stringing together my own strange ideas. So, this song is essentially to “Innuendo” what Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” is to the Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” if you follow my meaning. Fun stuff.

The "guitar" 'part is the explosion in an otherwise vast, empty space. I couldn’t just have created such a place without something happening within it. It’s the supernova, that part, followed by a great miracle of creation. That idea is familiar to the Sim Earth song and lots of old religious music from centuries ago.

Ultimately, it was great fun to do and provided an opportunity to try all kinds of new things.

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Check Mii Out

2007-11-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

Originally from Nintendo's Check Mii Out Channel on the Nintendo Wii.

This cover is probably the one I’ve done which is the least changed from the original. I heard it for the first time on the Wii, thought that it rocked, and figured I’d make it rock harder. That was the simplistic thinking there.

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Big Brilliant Cluster

2007-04-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

Originally composed by Yu Miyake from Katamari Damacy for the Sony Playstation 2.

Katamari Damacy is a game which looks very angular, geometric, and mathy but also extremely cartoony so that’s what I set out to do here. The blocky geometry and mathiness translated into low-fi synthesizer sounds, and the cartoon aspect became the bouncy, dance-like quality heard throughout.

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The Great Experiment

2007-03-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Originally composed by Takane Okubo from Sim Earth for the Super NES.

Sim Earth is a Maxis game like most others where you are God and you create the world within a certain scope. You had Sim City, you had Sim Ant, and here’s Sim EARTH which, at the time, was mind blowing because the game tasked the player with developing entire planets. This involved deciding on the size, age, axis orientation, and other factors of your planet along with how the geology of the planet worked and what degree of which processes were found in the atmosphere. You could eventually create water, life, and even watch civilizations rise up or destroy them all with a meteor.

That was if you wanted to start from scratch. Otherwise, you could choose to begin with planets at different timescales such as the dawn of life, or the dawn of technology, or just a planet completely covered in water. Each of these types of worlds had their own music and, having found myself liking a great many of them, thought I should go ahead and cover a few.

I started with what I felt would be a nice sound-of-empty-space sort of music for the beginning as there would be a vast nothing before one started cultivating their world, right? Sort of the ambient soundtrack to a stellar nursery. Next is a very desolate sounding bit for a desolate planet. This is music from an empty random planet mode I believe. Once this all settles into its groove, the sounds of animals like birds and such can be heard and this represents the majestic flourishing of life on the planet. These sounds then usher in the final theme from the game, the song which plays as a significant event changes the planet. It’s a happy end to a great experiment on a planetary level.

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Frappe Holidays

2006-12-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

Originally composed by Kenta Nagata from Mario Kart 64 for the Nintedo 64.

In the winter of 2007, the idea to form a Metroid Metal members-made Christmas album was thrown around and this was my contribution. It’s the stage music to “Frappe Snowland” from Mario Kart 64 which is an ice level populated by enormous, hostile penguins. So there you go. Frappe Holidays, car engines, and penguin sounds.

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Go, Epona, Go!

2006-12-07T21:21:00.000-08:00

Originally composed by Toru Minegishi, Asuka Ohta, and Koji Kondo from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Nintendo Wii.

Sometimes I think to myself, “Make it jazz!” I don’t listen to jazz and am not at all proficient as a jazz musician, but I rather like my own impression of what jazz music is and thought this one should be done in that style. I can’t say the flute has ever been my favorite instrument, but it somehow really shines when in the context of a jazz band and that’s the main reason I chose it. Also, I like that it has those old, foresty associations. When I think of flutes, I usually think of hobbits in marching bands anyway.

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Marshmallow

2005-12-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

Originally composed by Rich Vreeland from The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage.

Rich Vreeland is this monster whose music I was introduced to on the Metroid Metal message boards. It was (and still is) music unlike anything else ever, and it’s extremely good and extremely clever and we used to bounce ideas off of each other all the time. The original version of this song is called “Martianmallow Town” from his album, The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage which is the soundtrack to an imaginary game of his. I loved it when I heard it but couldn’t help hearing it differently in my memory and figured I’d might as well record it the way I remembered it. I asked his permission and not only did he give me the go ahead, he sent me his actual song files to play with. I don’t recall expecting an open-source angle into the song, but how generous!

In retrospect, I think I took his unique music and made it more conventional sounding than anything else. I intended to evoke the energy of live musicians. Classic Motown recordings have that quality to them where you can almost hear the room itself and I had a feeling that a sound like that might be right for what I wanted to do. Rich programmed the original instruments himself using his own peculiar methods, and much of this data is what I imported to use as I wished. In essence, this song has been re-produced rather than performed entirely myself, and the personality of the music is still very much his own as a result. It was plenty good to begin with so I honestly didn’t see the need to try and copy what he’d already done. As I said, open source!

Please visit Rich's site: disasterpeace.com !!

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Attainment Suite

2005-12-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

This is one of my own original concoctions.

My goal was to take a set of motifs and styles through an emotional journey based loosely on the Kübler-Ross model of coping with grief (skipping over the first stage because, musically, “denial” really wouldn’t fit). Many artists prefer to leave their work open to interpretation, but I know that really, everyone wants to know what the artists themselves meant or felt about something they’ve made. So the explanation above is, in my own view, what’s going on. Naturally, I still encourage anyone to make of this work what they will (within the rules outlined by the Creative Commons license of course!).

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Norfair and Title Themes

2005-11-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

Originally composed by Hirokazu Tanaka from Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Game music, for all its variety and breadth of styles, is more often than not re-arranged by fans for guitar because, I imagine, that’s simply the instrument of choice as it has been the most commonly used instrument in popular music for over fifty years now. And of the children who played Metroid when it was new and have now grown into music-creating adults, many of them naturally do so with their guitars.

By virtue of not being a guitarist, any cover coming from me was surely going to be approached very differently. Rock and metal have become the most common styles used for video game covers, and one could do no better than Stemage’s amazing examples of this at Metroid Metal. However, as wonderfully as metal and game music apparently fit together, I’ve personally never thought of Metroid as being very “metal” at all and wanted to use some of the eerie, sci-fi elements of the game and its positively dense atmosphere to influence the sound of my mix and thus ended up taking it in a direction closer to what I thought that would sound like.

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Title and Village Themes

2005-10-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

Originally composed by Naofumi Hataya from Golden Axe II for the Sega Genesis.

Like all of the game music I cover, I chose these themes because I really enjoy listening to them and wanted to learn how they worked in the way that a curious tinkerer disassembles and reassembles a gadget to understand it. I also wanted to hear the music again for the first time as well as apply my own ideas and creativity to these already great pieces as both a tribute to them and as a challenge to rise to their level of awesomeness. If my versions are inferior to the originals, then I’ve failed in that respect, but still learned a great deal just the same. I’m definitely more than happy if my versions are on at least the same level as the originals though.

The Village is the theme to the first stage of the Sega Genesis game after the introductory story (from which the music at the beginning comes from, obviously) which takes place in a village. This presumably peaceful place has been overrun by raiders and evil minions and it’s the job of the player to drive them out in a 2D sidescrolling brawler format.

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