The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Song of Storms
Koji Kondo
"Song of Storms" is the outlier in this company — frenetic where the others are still, communal where they are private. Kondo builds it from an accordion figure that sounds like it belongs in a Viennese café or a French village square, then layers in a melody of almost manic urgency. The tempo is brisk enough to feel slightly breathless, and the harmonic movement has a spinning quality, circular and slightly dizzying. Despite its origins as a piece you play on an ocarina to summon weather, it has taken on a strange second life as one of the most recognizable pieces of video game music ever written — recognizable even to people who have never touched the game. Part of its power is structural: it's built from an earworm loop that your brain latches onto immediately and won't release. But there's also something genuinely emotionally ambiguous about it — it's too fast and rhythmically insistent to be purely melancholic, but the minor key and the drone beneath it keep it from being simply cheerful. It exists in its own category: playful dread, festive melancholy. You'd hear it at a loud gathering and feel a sudden private nostalgia for something you can't name.
fast
1990s
spinning, dizzying, bright
Japanese video game score with Central European folk influences
Video Game Music. Folk-inflected game score / earworm loop. playful, melancholic. Spins through frenetic, dizzying momentum while the minor key underneath prevents it from ever resolving into simple joy — festive melancholy held in perpetual rotation.. energy 7. fast. danceability 6. valence 5. vocals: instrumental only. production: accordion figure, layered melody, minor key drone, circular harmonic movement. texture: spinning, dizzying, bright. acousticness 5. era: 1990s. Japanese video game score with Central European folk influences. Loud gathering where you suddenly feel a private, inexplicable nostalgia for something you can't name.