Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Madam Ventricle

Okay, I’m gonna go and change plans on myself here. Back when I put these Character Soundtracks on hold so I could focus on website/comic work, my ORIGINAL intention was to bring them back with a focus on the new Nitpickers introduced over Christmas. Yes, there was Blip’s thing as a kinda sorta April Fools joke, but as a general trend I was going to use these blogs to big up the new folks instead of the old cast. After all, just in case you missed me saying it a HUNDRED times before, I actually created soundtracks for all those characters BEFORE the characters themselves. I’d throw together a playlist around a certain musical theme, and then draw up the kind of character I thought would listen to that music. It was a very successful experiment, and I’m pretty excited to show off all those soundtracks… so much so that I don’t even care that nobody’s had a chance to see any of these characters outside of that handful of Christmas pages. So what if none of you know or care who they are? I WILL MAKE PEOPLE LISTEN TO MY PLAYLISTS!!! But here’s the thing: somewhere in the middle of that pause, before I even had the chance to start typing up any blogs for all those new nitpickers, something else hit me. Out of all the Character Soundtrack blogs/playlists I’ve cranked out already, I still didn’t have any playlists for Madam Ventricle & Kiki!

This is another thing I keep mentioning, but Madam Ventricle and Kiki are right at the top of my “I really want to do more with these characters” list. They’re always fun to work with anytime I DO get the chance, but those chances are few and far between, so I still feel like we only barely know anything about them. It especially rubs me the wrong way because so much of what we HAVE seen boils down to “grumpy short girl and cheerful tall girl,” and in case you haven’t noticed, Far Out There already has a duo with that gimmick. I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to give these mad scientist ladies more of their own unique identities, but that doesn’t mean much if I never get the chance to actually show any of that in a comic. Well, in lieu of actually drawing more comics featuring the pair, I can at least use my musical choices here to explain a bit more about what I think these girls are like as characters.

Madam Ventricle gets to go first because, honestly, I just love how her playlist turned out. Despite being one of the most recent ones, it‘s rapidly turned into one of the Far Out There soundtracks I listen to the most as casual background music. Fittingly, it shares a lot of similarities with one of my OTHER favorite character soundtracks: Mariska’s. If you can remember that far back, I spent a sizable chunk of that blog post talking about this Lounge/Cocktail/Exotica revival that pretty big in Indie music through the late-90s and early-00s. While Mariska’s soundtrack filtered that through an additional layer of Triphop/Downtempo drum machines, Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack goes the opposite direction and pipes that 60s/70s kitch though a quieter, spacier, scifi sound. After all, she IS a mad scientist, remember? Of COURSE she’d listen to music that sounds like it belongs in a scifi film, right?

More than that, though, I wanted Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack to have a sort of stately, sophisticated, peaceful feel to it. After all, just look at her name. What’s up with that “Madam” bit? I’ll be honest, when I first came up with the character, I was just on a Monty Python kick and though “Madam Ventricle” was the kind of nonsensical name they would make up. Upon reflection, though, that kind of title obviously implies some sort of nobility, and with it wealth. And if you think about it, coming from a family with wealth and power would be VERY useful for somebody who wants to spend all day doing big, elaborate, expensive experiments with minimal practical applications. In fact, it’d probably also explain how she wound up in a position of power in that Mad Scientist Convention, her family probably funds the whole thing! So I wanted music that simultaneously sounded sophisticated but also kind of trippy, and that Indie Lounge subgenre is what came to mind.

What’s more, I also wanted music that was both soft and harmonious. The fact that we first saw Madam Ventricle being stressed out over a chaotic situation and trying to bring it under control suggests that she prizes calmness and order. The notion of her coming from a background full of posh, fancy elegance only serves to reinforce that notion. The bigger your house is, the more work has to go into keeping it clean, ya know? Madam Ventricle is probably the sort of lady who cares DEEPLY if somebody uses the wrong fork for the wrong course, so it’d make sense for her to care if a musician is playing a note at the wrong time. Thus, I tried to focus on music with lots of pretty harmonies and unconventional chord changes and elaborate elements working together, with bonus points if it’s generally calming and gentle. She may be stuck cleaning up the messes of crazy idiots all the time in real life, but at least her music can serve as a calming happy place.

But what IS that music? Well, the first artist that came to mind for Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack was The Flaming Lips. They weren’t an explicitly revivalist act like some of the other early 2000s artists doing the whole Space Age Cocktail thing, but their albums from that era nevertheless sound like they came off an educational film strip from the 70s meant to teach manners to space aliens. There’s a whopping five tracks here, easily the most of any artists, so they drive the tone for the whole playlist as well as providing a nice cross section of the band’s commercial peak. We’ve got “All We Have Is Now” off of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” from At War With The Mystics, “Gemini Syringes” from Embryonic, and both parts of “The Distance Between Mars And The Earth” off their Christmas On Mars soundtrack, which means part of this playlist is LITERALLY from a scifi film! I’d expected there to be a lot more turn-of-the-millennium Indie artists on the soundtrack, but by the time the song selection was finalized, the choices had thinned out significantly. Blatantly kitchy Lounge Revivalist act Combustible Edison provides the song “Utopia,” which might as well be the theme song to an ad campaign for tourism on The Moon. Twee Pop darlings The Apples In Stereo provide the short, gentle “Ruby, Tell Me,” while a latter day They Might Be Giants show up with one of the great “where’s my flying car? I was promised flying cars!” laments: “The World Before Later On.” Finally, Cibo Matto gives us an ironic, mellotron-driven cover of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” that was also going to serve as my Token Japanese Song for this soundtrack… until several more snuck on without my even realizing what I was doing at the time.

Yeah, another part of the reason I like Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack so much is because it totally went off the rails of what I had planned, but turned out much better as a result. It’s always easier for me to appreciate anything that takes an unexpected turn like that, because it feels like I’m just appreciating something happening outside of myself. No need to be humble about something that doesn’t really feel like it’s mine, ya know? Originally, the plan was for the soundtrack to be split between Flaming Lips-esque 00s Indie Pop and 60s Prog Rock like The Moody Blues. There was this whole strain of early Prog bands from England who didn’t do the “twenty minute virtuoso keyboard solo” thing but instead leaned on a classy, literate, innate Britishness for their sense of sophistication. I thought that would work pretty well as an expression of Madam Ventricle’s posh upbringing. I mean, The Moody Blues had a designated flute player, for crying out loud. And yet, in the end, only two Moody Blues songs ended up on the final playlist: “Out And In” and “Watching And Waiting,” both off the somewhat overlooked To Our Children's Children's Children. I though about including the better-known “Nights In White Satin” as well, but forgot that I’ve already got that one on another soundtrack you’ll be hearing eventually. Besides, that song’s probably a bit too big and melodramatic, “Out And In” and “Watching And Waiting” are much more in keeping with goal of a gentle, spacy, relaxing tone for Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack. In fact, I was surprised at just how many of the songs I was looking at felt too Rock-y for this soundtrack, probably the only time in history anyone has ever accused The Moody Blues of rocking too hard.

In fact, a LOT of the 60s songs I’d originally slotted in to this playlist wound up being pushed out after just a few listens for not having the right mood. David Bowie checks in with the immortal “Space Oddity,” because of COURSE the soundtrack for a mad scientist is going to feature Rock’s most iconic song about space travel. On the exact opposite end of the notoriety scale, the deeply obscure Timebox provides the closest thing to a “well-known” song they ever had: the atypically Psychedelic “Gone Is The Sad Man.” In the end, Madam Ventricle’s soundtrack wound up being much more 70s-centric than 60s, I guess because the definition of “rock” at that point had expanded enough to accommodate songs without a pounding beat behind them. French Prog band Alpha Ralpha provide “Syrtis Major,” which desperately wants to be the intro to a Pink Floyd song, while fellow Frenchmen Space have similar aspirations with the awesomely titled “Ballad For Space Lovers.” Completing this totally unintentional triad of 70s French guys who want to be Pink Floyd, Paul Piot contributes “Vertueuse Réveuse,” which admittedly sounds as much like Ennio Morricone as the Floyd. Also, having made multiple jokes about these songs sounding like they came from educational filmstrips, I should point out that “Vertueuse Réveuse” actually IS from a stock music library, so it probably really did get used in an industrial film somewhere.

Elsewhere, Power Pop pioneers Badfinger provide the WILDLY out of character “Saville Row,” a brief snippet of synth-driven elevator music used as the intro to an otherwise-unrelated song. Continuing this new theme of songs you haven’t heard of by bands you have, Queen contributes the prototypical Filk song “’39,” which combines a space age sea shanty with an instrumental break that demonstrates EXACTLY why Queen was tapped to provide the soundtrack to Flash Gordon. Finally, The Electric Light Orchestra gives us “The Whale,” a lush instrumental that does in one song what The Flaming Lips tried to do across the four whole albums represented on this playlist (and with none of the acid casualty noise that consumed their later work).

Riding that ELO connection into the 80s, former band members Richard Tandy & David Morgan add “The Secret,” which is another scifi rock song with an unexpected British Folk sound. And speaking of ex-members of 70s bands, Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright throws in “Waves” off one of his rare solo albums, a song that honestly sound more Pink Floyd-like than anything Pink Floyd themselves released in the 80s. Rounding out this third subset of songs is “Time” by The Alan Parsons Project, a big lush piano-based ballad that’s itself surprisingly similar to the Pink Floyd song… “Us And Them.” What, you thought I’d say some other track off of Dark Side Of The Moon? Well, either way, Alan Parsons produced that album, so of course he’d know how to get the same kind of sound.

And then… the odd ones out. Somehow, in the process of filling out the track selections and letting the musical flow manifest, I wound up with some video game and anime soundtrack selections in the mix. That was never a part of the plan, but they totally work in this context anyway. On the video game side, we have “Silence Before The Storm” from Final Fantasy X. There’s probably a few dozen Final Fantasy tunes other people will think of before this one, but “Silence Before The Storm” has always been one of my all time favorite Nobuo Uematsu compositions.  I especially love how the song appears to use an actual mellotron instead of the now standard synth keyboards (or, possibly, a synth that’s sampled a mellotron) giving it the same warbly tape sound that’s all over the the Moody Blues songs. And then, as the closing track on the playlist, we have “White Hill – Maromi’s Theme” from the Paranoia Agent soundtrack. Aside from the fact that it continues to fit the “spacy but calming” tone of the soundtrack as a whole, this one song as always had an especially powerful sense of finality to me. Not only is it the closing credits song for Paranoia Agent, but back in the day Paranoia Agent was the last show on Adult Swim’s anime block. Hearing this song didn’t just mean the show was over, it meant the day was over and it really was time to go to bed. And seeing as how the song is basically a music box lullaby, you couldn’t ask for a better tune to close out with.

Actually, looking back over these songs again, I think I might have accidentally constructed a bit of a narrative with the more scifi-related songs. It’s not exactly a rock opera or anything, and not EVERY song fits the narrative, but there is a general arc that works surprisingly well for a mad scientist. “The World Before Later On” is the opening track, and the whole lament over the lack of a promised future feels like a great statement of purpose for a mad scientist character. Again, I didn’t even do that on purpose, I was just looking for a song that felt like it ought to go before “The Distance Between Mars And The Earth, pt. 1” and didn’t notice until after that it was about ray guns and jet packs. I could probably make an argument that “Black Hole Sun” continues that sense of yearning, though that song’s lyrics are so poetic for poetry’s sake that I could probably argue it into meaning anything I wanted. Likewise, I could probably try to pass off “Time” as a sort of “years passing” montage as our main character grows up, though that’d also be pushing things a bit. It’s with “Out And In” where things start to get interesting, as that’s a fairly optimistic song about space travel. It’s the future now, and it’s awesome. This actually IS “Later On!” To reinforce that, we’ve got “Utopia,” a pastiche of late-50s/early-60s optimism that’s so straight faced that it could easily be taken at face value. What raving mad scientist doesn’t believe all those atomic monsters with transplanted brains aren’t somehow being made for the benefit of mankind? No, it’s you, YOU who are mad! Speaking of which, between “Out And In’ and “Utopia” we have “Gone is The Sad Man,” a song about that classic 60s ideal of dropping everything and going off to be a manchild. Like so many songs of its ilk, “Gone Is the Sad Man” entertains the notion of insanity being a kind of childlike innocence, preferable that the TRUE insanity that it modern adult society. Surely a notion mad scientists would sympathize with, in spirit if not in practice.

But then comes the downfall. “’39” is an ostensibly positive song, what with the mission described being a success, but the singer finds himself on the wrong end of time dilation, stuck in a future where all his loved ones are long dead. Not exactly “Utopia” anymore (or “Out And In”, for that matter). And after another string of instrumentals (which, fittingly, are much gloomier and minor key than the first half) comes “All We Have Is Now,” in which the singer describes meeting an alternate timeline future version of himself who explains how the singer’s world is doomed. The song itself is intentionally vague about what exactly is going on, which allows it to fit nicely into this generic “science gone wrong” narrative. And just one track later comes “Space Oddity,” which famously end with something going wrong and the singer becoming lost in space. Again, the song is notoriously vague about WHAT went wrong, but all that matters in out little mad science song cycle is that SOMETHING has to go wrong. Something ALWAYS goes disastrously wrong. And speaking of disasters, the very next song is “Watching And Waiting,” which is sung from The Earth’s point of view long after mankind has abandoned it. At least, that’s what we understand from the context of an entire album full of space songs. On its own, the song could just as easily be post-apocalyptic: a long-since-healed Earth not grasping why those things that used to live on it aren’t around anymore. If our song cycle is following a mad scientist who longed for an idealized future only to go mad pursuing it, it’d make a nice ironic twist if the cataclysmic failure of the experiments actually DID create a pastoral paradise, only with nobody around to enjoy it. At least, that’s the kind of bleak story my cynical brain would try to construct. There’s a reason I make such a deliberate effort to keep Far Out There a comedy.

But that’s all secondary fluff. Two paragraphs of secondary fluff. And it’s not even all that consistent. I mean, the ACTUAL last song with lyrics, “Ruby, Tell Me,” is just a silly love song that fits the musical flow. “The Secret” doesn't really fit into this alleged narrative (or, at the very least, it’s redundant with “’39” coming right after it) while the other Flaming Lips tracks are either out of place (“My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”) or just generally meaningless (“Gemini Syringes”). If I’d been deliberately trying to assemble a coherent narrative here, I’d deem this a total failure. But the point is, I WASN’T trying. I was only thinking about the general musical themes I wanted for Madam Ventricle, not how the songs’ lyrics flowed together. Heck, the very fact that this many songs with science fiction themes AT ALL managed to turn up in this playlist without me trying is kind of amazing. Who knew I knew so many songs about space stuff?

(Not a WHOLE lot of behind the scenes extra notes on this one. Honestly, most of the big stuff made it into the blog proper. I will say that, in at least one respect, those of you who actually listen to this playlist on YouTube are actually getting a nicer listening experience than I do when I listen to it on my iPod. See, the Moody Blues song “Out And In” is, like so many of their songs from that era, part of a larger suite of interconnected tracks. They aren’t WRITTEN that way, but they fade in and out of each other on the album itself. Thus, my copy of “Out And In” begins with a sudden, jarring last few measures of the previous song, “Beyond,” fading out as the new songs fades in. I’m using the words “in” and “out” a lot while talking about a song called “Out And In.” I need to stop that. Thankfully, it’s the last track on side one of the album, so at least the closing fade is clean. Here’s the thing, though: there was a random compilation album in the late 80s that contains the only version of the song I know of with a clean fade-in, and somebody posted that version to YouTube. Alas, the compilation is both out of print and expensive, and while the YouTube version is decent enough to work for the purposes of this blog, it’s NOT clean enough to be an acceptable substitute for my current copy, even with the noisy intro. Enjoy what you have, people. Otherwise, the weirdest thing to happen while trying to put together this playlist was the realization that, apparently, every single Flaming Lips song is banned in Cuba, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. All of them, all posted by separate accounts, all with the exact same set of blocked countries. Heck, I’m kind of astonished to see ANY videos specifically blocked in North Korea… in the sense that I just assumed ALL Internet was blocked to most North Koreans. Why even go through the trouble of individually blocking songs by this one specific band? Then again, “Space Oddity” was blocked in the exact same set of countries, too. It’s just weird, is all. Oh, and one more thing. While I eventually did post a video of “Ballad For Space Lovers” that features the album audio, I was VERY tempted to substitute this live version instead. The audio’s not as good, obviously, but MAN I live the look of this thing. Check out that space age sleeveless red leather suit, the laser light show in the back, the very fact that it’s A KEYTAR PLAYER FRONT AND CENTER OF A BAND. This is exactly what a band playing a song called “Ballad For Space Lovers” ought to look like. Actually, the weirdest thing might be the header image for this blog post. Look a bit weird? That’s because it’s technically a new image. Rather than just zooming in on a currently existing page, I instead dug up the line art for page 969 and totally re-edited it in full color. This added untold extra hours onto getting this blog finished, and I’m still not entirely sure why I didn’t just crop out a piece of an exiting page. I’m really weird like that.)

Madam Ventricle's YouTube Playlist