NextColony Soundtrack Suite: Trk 1 - "Shipyard Overtime"

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After discovering and quickly immersing myself in NextColony (https://nextcolony.io/), a space exploration game new to the Steem Blockchain, I felt particularly inspired to revisit what is perhaps my favorite genre to write: ambient spacefaring industrial design music. Born too early, I tell yah. Sometimes I truly feel like my calling is coming up with interesting arpeggios and drones to soundscape massive cargo containers full of obscure minerals descending in zero-g to a bustling spaceport floor. What is NextColony, you ask? As a veteran of 0.0 space Eve Online alliance battling, I can tell you it is immediately scratching my skill-tree-timer itch. Ingame you colonize indelible planets on the blockchain, harvest resources, build ships, find more NFT planets ... more than enough to get this ex-capsuleer back on the sauce. Big time.

To get into a space colony headspace. I'm using a few of my favorite go-tos (Cwejman VCO-6 triangle output -> Echophon for the main arpeggio) ... though I'm specifically avoiding my first impulse towards french horns. After recently reposting some of my soundtrack to the Outer Empires IOS space RPG, I quickly realized the french horn is literally the sound of space cliche. It is -incredibly- easy to get things to sound interstellar with melancholic french horn. I'm instead relying on the modular to take a series of arpeggios and "find" the lead note change as I introduce it, sustaining it into what is effectively a lead. I think for any sort of game soundtrack-based material, keeping lead elements as minimal as possible is crucial.

Three quarters through the song, I introduce some sampled classical guitar, which I feel like lends alot of the same "into the unknown" sort of timbre I would be getting with horns, but in a much more interesting and modern-sample-collage sort of way. Sometime about the push and pull of this section embodies what I'd imagine a typical day on a spaceport would be like: total droning boredom punctuated by moments of extreme drama and intensity. Although the sample isn't a perfect fit, with a bit of modular manipulation and some minimalist drums, I think it gets the point across. I captured a video of the performance which I'l be posting tomorrow!

Fun fact: the planet in this post's top image is, infact, OP3RATOR_PRIME, my first uncommon atmospheric planet. Meta.

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