Ancient Aliens - Stuart Rynn (2016)

I have to use the word "sublime" to properly describe Stewboy's compositions - his extensive body of work, and ability to invoke spellbinding, anthemic sounds out of the humble General MIDI soundbank prove he is a musical virtuoso in every sense of the word.

This is what I wrote about Stew's compositional modus operandi two full years ago, when he and fellow community goliath skillsaw dropped the monolithic "Heartland", which in itself had an absolutely searing soundtrack, matched only by AD_79's "Arrival" soundtrack that same year in the contest for the 2021 Dootaward.

Ancient Aliens' feature-length custom soundtrack is an effervescent suffusion of atmosphere, jazz, and worldbeat percussion, thirty-five pieces strong. Quite astonishingly, only a handful of these tracks pass the four-minute mark, with many of them sitting comfortably around the length of 2:30. How Stuart spins such timeless classics out of the relatively limited toolkit of GM remains a mystery to me. When it comes to my own compositions, I tend to agonise about getting the most out of the material possible, through transformation and recapitulation. Stew doesn't care massively about traditional structuring or harmonic progression in his pieces, allowing him to weave freeform masterpieces out of thin air that, through their own natural ebb and flow, carry the listener on a time-melting journey through sound. Despite the occasional rock guitar piercing through the mix, these are not contemporarily "Doomy" tracks by any stretch of the imagination – but who needs that sort of thing when the mapset in question is as extraterrestrial as Ancient Aliens, with its explosively turquoise-and-magenta visual feasts and polished-polychrome deep-space techbase settings? You'd simply be a fool to wish for Bobby's blues here.

Charging headlong into AA for the first time, players will be greeted by "Flee", which cracks through the onscreen action as the player ducks and dodges past unrelenting cyberdemon salvos. One aspect that I think shines through particularly brilliantly in Stew's work is that there's always such hope in his compositions. He seems categorically unable to enforce any negative thought patterns in his audience's head, giving them the idea of salvation from the deepest dark places, and success against impossible odds, which given AA's tendency towards slaughter-adjacent gameplay in its last few maps, is counter to what many fans of challenge maps will be used to – take, for example, the thrumming background drones present throughout Sunlust's "The Womb", or the hair-raising, anxiety-inducing march of madness that was chosen specifically to make "Inverti in Darkness" the infamous map it is. No, Stew's got far more positive musical threads to spin.

Back to the soundtrack: the humbly named "Desk Lamp" accompanying MAP04 is no mere item of utility in the AA soundtrack – it's a standout track, with grand, beauteous flute solos floating over the top of tastefully virtuosic acoustic guitar backing. Stuart is kind of a genius for being able to make MIDI sound "real" – you need only listen to the covers by Xeotroid and ilk to hear how the original GM composition in no small way helps the volunteering producer to arrive at an astonishingly lifelike end product (just listen to those guitar strums at the start!). Other, more electronically-oriented pieces, like "Featherfall", "Gold Rush", and "Gigabridge" carry a kind of intensity which is still altogether serene, with propulsive synthesizers and power kit snares, reassuring the player they're on the path to conquering the demons of their deepest desert dreams.

It should be noted that AA prefers to take its foot off the pedal every so often, with gentler and moodier tracks allowing the listener to drift amidst the atmosphere of its otherworlds, these tracks imparting the type of urgent serenity of sitting in the eye of a tropical storm, such as in "The Incessant Flow of Time", "Hell Jungle", "Vase", "The Demon's Serenade", and "Martian Blues". And need anything be said about the masterstrokes "Trapeze", "Imaginarium", "The Greater Good", "Colliding Nebulae", and "Yuletide"? These are the tracks that define Ancient Aliens – a mapset already renowned for being a convention-shirking masterpiece. Somersaulting melodic lines, steadfast chord progressions that shatter the norm we've come to expect, and weighty ambience that transports us to another cosmic realm altogether – unquestionably fitting for the next-to-spiritual journey that is AA.

Praises for Stewboy should never go unsung, and while I'm a touch remorseful that I never got directly involved with Ancient Aliens myself, I wish it all the longevity and endurance, which everyone must admit is simply inevitable. To think – Stew is a classically-trained percussionist and ensemble performer, having toured around the globe for performances and recitals of his own work, and we humble Doomers are getting all this amazing music for FREE! 

- @Jimmy

TNT: Revilution - Various Artists (2017)

Team TNT has always captured a special part of the Doom community’s collective imagination; these were the original creators to make a splash in the nascent modding scene of the 90s and the first notable example of modders ascending the ladder from third-party content to canonical installment. Hell, the ethos of the Team is right there in their moniker’s etymology: The New Technology. While The Plutonia Experiment embodied the new technology of gameplay and level design whose influence echoes throughout the modding sphere, it was the new technology of TNT: Evilution’s music that set a new bar for what MIDI should accomplish in a Doom game.

As Jimmy so poignantly wrote in his coverage of the original TNT Soundtrack, the seeds germinated by TNT have propagated into a veritable rhizome, a dense network of roots and references within which the modern Doom community is fiercely entangled. Perhaps that’s why, seemingly every couple of years, we reboot the concept of a “TNT” styled megawad. At the time of writing, there are at least 5 direct megawad sequels or spinoffs from the TNT IWADs.

The origins of TNT: Revilution are controversial and storied, but we’re here to talk music! And this soundtrack is one that thoroughly honors its controversial and storied progenitor. TNT OG composer Jeremy Doyle joins modern masters Bucket, Tristan Clark, and Varis Alpha (Visca Maelstrom) for a score that both pays homage to, remixes, and subverts the 1996 OST. The composers deliver the full gamut of mid-90s thrasher midirock captured perfectly by Bucket’s TiN Toker, authentic SSG backing tracks like REQ-JD10 by Jeremy Doyle, winkingly goofy adventure-synth romps like Becoming a Machine (one of mapper Eradrop’s two contributions to the soundtrack) to what are in my opinion the real standout. Tom Mustainesque, Teen Angst Spiritual Alignment MIDI anthems by Viscra Maelstrom. Viscra’s track Contempt (I Hate You) has always stood out to me as the most authentic Revilution song–not because of its structural or sonic similarity to the original–but the pitch perfect atmosphere created from a simple, catchy, and undeniably TOUGH song with an idiosyncratic chorus that just screams The New Technology. 

Revilution’s OST isn’t revolutionary (sorry) but its genius lies in capturing and refracting the zeitgeist of an exciting and unprecedented time in the history of our community, which I might add is more vibrant and prolific on the eve of Doom’s 30th birthday than anyone in Team TNT or even ID software could have ever predicted. Maybe The New Technology has always been how you innovate the old stuff.

- @Bank

Magnolia - Ribbiks (2018)

Ribbiks as a composer has played a similar role as zan-zan-zawa-veia, known less for a specific work and more for one-off compositions that have found themselves all around. Drawing from genres like math rock and djent, sometimes using string ensembles that evoke classical music but with an undercurrent of horror, his MIDIs have proven to be some of the best accompaniments for, well, the sort of maps he likes to make. If you asked someone who knew little about the community what sorts of background MIDI a difficult, oppressive Doom map might use, you might get guesses like hard rock and metal, or maybe extreme genres like splittercore or Latvian rockabillycore -- but more ambitious ultra-hard levels have tended towards tracks that are somber or downbeat, sometimes even discordantly soothing.  

It is hard to imagine a wad with such an idiosyncratic vision as Magnolia not having a soundtrack that follows suit. Playing over the first map, dfd7_d.mid's bells and harps are like ice crystals, pirouetting over gentle bass figuration, in a rhythm that has the signature math rock influence that Ribbiks has brought to so many of his tracks. Like the borrowed bgm for Sunlust map08, it is a deceptively pretty song for such a potentially harrowing map. The third map goes full darkness and bang_extended.mid follows, a menacing dirge that sometimes feels like it was down-pitched to the bottom of the ocean. It proceeds in chromatic steps and exotic chords and can sound almost playful in its devilry, like some abyssal creature stalking its prey for fun. The crystalline bells like map01's every now and then come back. Rather than gentle melodies, though, they are like icicles that will stab you.

He's grown even more since then, and in recent years, MIDIs like moi_re.mid, and arkeiv.mid have been plucked from his website listings and used to give a certain magical touch to mappers' visions. Ribbiks has also been markedly consistent in providing his own spooky finishing touches to his yearly Halloween romps with Grain of Salt -- material among these including works like rachrachrach.mid and eflast.mid, of which each is a unique twist on moody, haunted music. It's hard to forget those sinister drums pounding your ears beneath the orange sky, or the sound of those unassuming string notes as you enter a confusing, monolithic structure with horrors untold waiting within.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge the intense SubTerra and its melancholic, dream-like remix in a celebration of Ribbiks' musical work. He reworked an urgent whirlwind of arpeggios, first used in a deadly bite-sized slime and stone creation, into a warm, comforting synth piece soundtracking the player’s drowsy search for a way out of the purgatory that they found themselves in. JUMPWAD also saw beautiful contributions in the form of the nostalgia-inducing cloudshaping.mid, framed against that snowy title screen, and oct17_re.mid -- a tear-jerking lullaby that defines the world it lives within, in more ways than one.

- @rd. & @Maribo

Rekkr - HexenMapper (2018)

Like Harmony before it, Rekkr (narrowly) predates the whole idea of a "boomer shooter." Instead, it asks what kind of game we might have gotten if another studio had made a Doom-engine game in the '90s to be released alongside Heretic, Hexen, and Strife. It succeeds brilliantly at capturing the era, but it's not foolishly anal about authenticity either, and the world it builds feels a bit 2010s-indie too; it's an odd mix of hardass Vikings and Celtic vibes and machineworks and eldritch horror (and whatever a game journalist might choose to call it, it probably has the suffix "-punk" attached to it). Like the game itself, the soundtrack had a fine line to walk—weave in all the threads of that unique amalgamated universe, make the music sound true to the era of Bobby Prince and Kevin Schilder, but create a polished sound for the 2018 audience of James Paddock and Tristan Clark at the same time. 

Like every good composer, HexenMapper makes the job sound easy. The soundtrack transports you to an era and a place that never existed by taking familiar, traditional instruments and song styles and meshing them with newer, more rocklike grooves and instrumental sounds that are so uncanny they're almost alien. That seamless blending of opposite extremes is similar to what Schilder did in the Heretic soundtrack, but Rekkr's tracks are much more recognizably European, allowing the game to establish an almost comfortable familiarity at times that it then belies and shatters with equal ease, the music dissolving into chaos and horror as barriers between life and death spill further open and the despairing mobs of the existentially damned take it out on the living the only way they understand. There's something almost cute about the colorful pixely world and the whimsy of the music alike (fittingly, because Rekkr is a very Doomcute game), right up until it doesn't feel so cute anymore.

And so you stride forth with the fanfare of trumpets and horns, march solemnly to the beat of heavy drums, sink into a moment's respite between battles to the soothing pluck of a harp, and bash skulls to the accompaniment of more astonishingly effective MIDI bagpipe tracks than you would have thought possible—and the things you're facing that are harder to define are represented by musical elements that are harder to define. However much the music itself seems to give you a warrior's strength by making you feel like a total asskicker, it also hangs over you like a shroud, reminding you that you're already doomed, that you have no real hope beyond a vengeance with questionable consequences. And so it goes—how can one composer make me want to flip the finger to Fate and accept it with stoic resignation at the same time? That kind of cohesive vision is the benefit of having a single composer write an entire OST, and Rekkr owes it a great debt.

- @Not Jabba

Exomoon - Deadwing (2018)

Ozonia got its official Dootaward already, but Exomoon remains my favorite of the Moonblood Trilogy, both for its maps and its soundtrack. Deadwing's music never fails to create an extremely rich blend of emotions—you can practically breathe it in like coffee mist—but Exomoon and its OST are the most melancholy-bittersweet of all, encapsulating the heart of what the trilogy is about.

Exomoon's archeological narrative follows an alien civilization that lost the battle to save itself and create a better future, that fell into oblivion knowing what it had lost and crying out in collective pain. The real genius of the music is in making you feel like you belong to that world, like you knew the people who died, even as you're trying to understand what happened to them through their own completely alien lens. The soundtrack's arrangements are unerringly human, and it makes the sense of loss feel so real and personal. It's far from one-note, though, and that's part of why it's effective—its sad, trailing guitar distortions and floaty pianos are more like a recurring theme amidst celebratory, worshipful hallelujahs and enthusiastic, upbeat rock riffs and ineffable jazz/funk/soul, every other emotion orbiting that dense melancholic core in dusty clouds like planetary rings. 

When you listen to the music in Exomoon, it's like hearing the voices of the dead, lingering on in the echoes of their ruined world and crying out, remember us—proud and lost and full of longing, stricken with grief but remembering the good times they had before it all fell apart. At the same time, the chill, jazzy elegies are the perfect counterpoint to the mapset's tense, rugged Plutonian brawls, making you feel like you're floating above the earthly hardships of war and turning each death into more of a reset, a chance to turn back the clock and let your soul fly free once more. Put it all together, and what results is one of the most eerie and beautiful compilations of musical tracks to ever grace the game.

- @Not Jabba

Eviternity - Various Artists (2018)

Let’s face it - MIDI writing is bloody hard. You’ve got to make a bunch of real-life instrument sounds in these electronic tones and hope that someone understands what you were going for. Even harder is putting together a bunch of them to make a cohesive soundtrack, especially when the maps that go to that soundtrack are quite varied in themes. 

So, how did the Eviternity team tackle this conundrum? Well, they brought in MIDIs from the most well-known names of the community. Alfonzo, stewboy, AD_79, Tristan Clark, and Jimmy (a LOT of Jimmy) graces the author list of the OST. Amongst this list of greats, there’s also some fantastic additions from Mark Klem, Yash Bandari, Scotty, and a bespoke track from Nabernizer. 

It’d be easy for me to just list off the most iconic tracks of this set, perhaps write a diatribe about the many intricacies of “The Godhood Suite” that would match its 40 minute runtime, detail to you about how incredible and accurate the covers of “Slave” by Leprous and “Epitome XIV” by Blut Aus Nord are, or gush about how “Ghostgrinder” continues to be the proggy earworm that keeps me coming back to this set, but - I don’t know if I can really do those tracks that kind of justice.

So here’s all I’ll say - the creation of an OST is an artform all on its own. It takes a sharp ear and a sharp eye to understand how the music that you choose, compose, or have composed, fits with the feel of the level that you have built. And in Doom (and all games) one cannot exist without the other. By far, Eviternity is one of the best examples of the art of the creation of the soundtrack that I have played in the decade I’ve been in this community. 

Eviternity II has also just been released, so look forward to my next article when we do this again in 2053!

- @Major Arlene

Tivauri - Zan-zan-zawa-veia (yakfak) (2019)

The arrangement and creative cohesion of an OST is a work of art unto itself, but it's composers like Zan-zan-zawa-veia who make the best argument against awarding music by the soundtrack. Released in a slow trickle over the years, and with an archival philosophy perhaps best described as "throw everything in the basement and maybe people will find it later," zzzv's MIDIs have nonetheless left as lasting a mark on Doom as those of many people whose names are accompanied by more fanfare (particularly when considered alongside the community's other major underground composer, Ribbiks).

Acknowledging my weak musical history chops, I'm just going to start by citing the Doom Wiki, which lists "vintage computer game soundtracks, jazz, funk, and 1970s progressive rock" as zzzv's main musical influences. What I do know is that they are one of the foundational pioneers of Doomweird. Their whole body of work (both mapping and music) rejects every trope norm it can think of, abandons the idea of order and structure wholeheartedly, and embraces the existentially bizarre as reality's true form. The first experience I remember with their music is the chaotic, dizzying track from Sheer Poison, which never fails to remind me of the music in the jarringly alien otherworlds of Talorus and the Ethereal Void from Ultima Underworld 2. Spidersilk's track is bouncier but equally untethered, an energetic flight of fancy along a path with no particular landmarks. The track in Northern Powerhouse feels like it was born in the bowels of some unfathomable machine, perhaps the one represented in the map itself.

I feel that around the time of Tivauri, their music subtly evolved—adapted itself around stronger moods that I connect with more, without losing any of the stylistic elements that made it interesting in the first place. The tracks in Tivauri slip from the cold jazz of an abandoned warehouse (map 01) to the cronky jazz of a horror circus (map 02) to the nerves-on-edge jazz of an impending crisis (map 03) to the empowered jazz of liftoff and flight (map 04), but all of it feels equally unravelled, equally divorced from the notion of an experience being spoonfed smoothly into the player's brain. (Incidentally, Tivauri is some of zzzv's best mapping, so check it out.)

None of this is to say that their music can't accompany more conventional types of Doom maps. The most well-known examples of that are tourniquet's Altitude and Mutabor, which use zzzv tracks to lend an unreality and disorientation to their labyrinthine layouts and choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. It lends serious credence to the idea that Doom maps are whatever their music makes them.

Although they've never released any particular magnum opus OST (nor have they sought to do so), I feel that presenting this award to the soundtrack of an unfinished, barely-known project, a set of MIDIs that feel like jotted-down notes in the background of a set of maps that feel like jotted-down notes, is peak zzzv, and perhaps the truest representation of their work. The logical processes of craftsmanship need the anti-logic of counterculture to put them in their place sometimes, and vice versa, but an artistic medium would never be the same without its full tapestry of senpais and crazy uncles, paragons and weirdos alike.

- @Not Jabba