Patrick Belaga – Solar Calf (PAN 167)

There are certain expectations attached to video game music. Whether it’s the innovative low-bitrate compositions that accompanied early cartridge-based capers, piped through over-active sound chips directly into millennial memory banks, or the lavish, CD-quality orchestrations that arrived soon after, game music has rapidly evolved into a language crammed with its own distinct grammar. On his second solo album, composer and performer Patrick Belaga uses that vernacular to wrestle himself from the constraints of the humdrum musical narrative. He conceived ‘Solar Calf’ as the soundtrack to his own playable environment, a vivid multi-dimensional space that actively supplants most albums’ expected beginning-to end storyline. Just like an open world game, ‘Solar Calf’ can be navigated by moving from zone to zone: from wide, verdant landscapes to tense, high-contrast interior spaces via the memorable interstitial areas where very little happens, but everything feels as if it’s charged with meaning.

Belaga found himself particularly drawn to Shigeru Miyamoto’s ‘The Legend of Zelda’ series of games. Not just Japanese composer Koji Kondo’s infectious musical themes, but the game’s evocative terrain: the labyrinthine dungeons and fantastical patchworks of forest enclaves, mountain villages and beachside locales. To redraw this topography with his own hand, Belaga replaces bits and pixels with the repetitions and interlocking patterns of the 20th century American minimalist school of composers, simultaneously employing textures and atmospheres that might usually be associated with the industrial scene’s experimental underground. The repetitions work like markers that introduce each different area of the map before subtle variations hint at change without forcing the usual structure. Exploration and movement is encouraged and even stasis is acceptable, but resolution is unlikely.

Attempting a form of sonic sleight of hand, Belaga muddles live woodwind, piano, strings, brass and percussion with digital instruments, re-sampling the results and interrupting the natural flow with DAW sequencing. This helps the senses to recalibrate for a record that’s not intended to be engaged with in the classic sense. So opener ‘Axis’ prepares listeners with its blocky piano phrases that Belaga underpins with unsettling resonances, growls and ASMR scratches; there’s something going on in the background, but exactly what that might be isn’t revealed. And a sense of calm washes over the record when ‘Lake’ pops up over the horizon, its evocative marimba hits and elongated cello tones falling into a sun- bleached, almost balearic rhythm. On ‘Plotted Graph’, meanwhile, Belaga’s sound palette mimics Kondo’s epic ‚Ocarina of Time’ OST, threading anxious kosmische synths through a jerky, percussive soundscape that sounds as if it’d be right at home under the Deku Tree.

And ‘Solar Calf’ keeps replenishing its heart containers as it glides from area to area. The lengthy ‘Upsurge’ transforms a peaceful forest theme into a chaotic vortex of fast-paced phrases and breathy pads, while ‘Tri-meld’ offers a nod to the Triforce with an uncompromisingly operatic fusion of woodwinds, sheet metal clangs and buried melodies. It’s an immersive experience that doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or an end – a world that exists independently and can be dipped into, saved and reloaded. There’s no fixed endpoint, there’s just ‘Solar Calf’.