Far Out There: Character Soundtrack - Sophia

Okay, so I have a list of all the Far Out There soundtracks with rough notes for the blog posts, and I’ve been sticking to the order of that list since I started posting these. I went and jumped WAY ahead for this one, though, because it’s character was actually appearing in the comics and I wanted to synch things up since I didn’t know when I’d get the chance again… and now I’m not actually getting the blog posted until after that appearance has passed. This is why there will never be Far Out There merchandising tie-ins. I suck at synergizing. 

But yeah, you know Sophia? Ichabod’s nitpicker boss who loves candy and may be either a super-intelligent little girl or a permanently tiny adult, we’re honestly not sure? Yep, she’s got a soundtrack too! I wasn’t planning on posting hers before all the more regularly seen characters, but… well, see above. In any case, what does a higher-up at The Galactic Nitpicker’s Guild listen to? There’s a line in her most recent appearance that was SUPPOSED to be an in-joke concerning this, but since I didn’t get the blog out before now, there’s no way it actually meant anything to anybody. That weird line about watching “old employee training videos”? Yeah, that was supposed to be a reference to her musical tastes. It’s hard to come up with a single genre to cite here that covers all the songs on Sophia’s soundtrack, at least not without being misleading. The most common official genre tag I’ve seen is “contemporary instrumental,” but that’s so vague as to be completely useless. Basically, it’s songs without words that aren’t classical or traditional. Really narrowed it down there, AllMusic. Thanks. “Smooth Jazz” gets applied to a lot of these songs, and back in the 80s when the term was coined, it might have been helpful, but these days “Smooth Jazz” refers to stuff with a lot more of a downtempo/triphop drumbeat than most of these songs have. Conversely, “New Age” is frequently brought up in relation to the more ethereal tracks here, and while it works in certain places, other tracks rock out (in a very limited sense) way more than most people would ever think appropriate for the New Age genre. I also see some variation of the “Fusion” tacked onto several of these artists, but the Jazz Rock implications there don’t really fit songs with as conventional a pop structure as these. Really, the only think I’ve found that covers every single song on this soundtrack and accurately says something about them is “80s soundtrack.” Be it a movie or TV show or training video or evening news or whatever, every one of these songs sounds like they came from stock library of background music somewhere. Basically, Sophia’s soundtrack is where vaporwave artists are born.

The opening track is “Warm Sound in a Gray Field” by session guitarists Peter Maunu, off his solo album of the same name. Right away, we have a good example of why the common genre tags applied to these songs are misleading. Warm Sound a Gray Field is often classified as a “New Age” album, but the title track is loaded with big 80s electric guitar solos that would blow the yoga pants right off anyone looking for calm meditation music. This is the sort of song that belongs in some Miami Vice-esque cop movie, in the moody scene right after hero cop’s partner dies or right before the big climactic shootout.

Speaking of Peter Maunu, the next track is by the session player supergroup he was a part of: Group 87. A track off their second (and final) album A Career in Dada Processing, “Pleasure in Progress” is –is I we’re continuing the soundtrack analogy– the bouncy, happy music that plays over some montage of establishing shots of a crowded beach or mall. Actually, it’s even more fitting as the soundtrack to the employee training video workers at that mall have to watch to smile while stocking shelves. So now you know where that reference came from! But yeah, “Pleasure in Progress” is a bouncy, bubbly synth-driven track that’s a BIT too musically complicated to fit in with modern Synthwave revivalist acts (in that it uses more than two chords) but still radiates the exact mood most of those artists spend their whole careers trying to capture.

Even more energetic is “Flightpath” by Jonn Serrie. If the previous two tracks sound like they came from some 80s cop show, then “Flightpath” sounds like what would happen if the theme to some local news show got into a transporter accident with a PBS science program. It’s very high-tempo with lots of stutter staccato synths, sounding vaguely futuristic without being full-on spacey.  If nobody’s licensed this track as the into jingle for a YouTube news series, I am very disappointed by everyone.

Next is “Eagle’s Path” by David Lanz and Paul Speer, which is another example of a “New Age” song that, while hardly anybody’s definition of rock, nevertheless rocks too hard to ever be anybody’s meditation music. This song is straight up training montage music. Not necessarily the big, head-banging hair metal anthem of the MAIN training montage, but the secondary montage. Like, the one that plays under the opening credits and establishes the protagonists normal levels of awesome before a need for revenge drives him to strive for levels of EXTRAORDINARY AWESOME. That, or a local car dealership showing off some really good deals on pickup trucks.

“The Long Riders” by Richard Souther begins to shift the mood a bit more towards what most people ACTUALLY think when they see something labeled “New Age.” While built around another staccato-y synth line similar to “Flightpath,” “The Long Riders” is a much more explicitly spacey track, lacking any percussion and simply keeping rhythm via layers and layers of Casios playing some deceptively Jazzy chord changes (I say “deceptively” because it’s not what I’d normally expect from a song named after cowboys). This is the kind of track one would expect to hear in the part of the instructional video where the video toaster throws several lists of bullet points up in front of the stock footage of some kind of colored vector grid.

Next up is probably the most well known song in the entire playlist, by DEFINITELY the most well known artists: “Evening Star” by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. The Evening Star album came out the same year as Eno’s Discreet Music, his “first” ambient album despite Evening Star operating on pretty much the same principles (and featuring one track that is literally just a snippet of Discreet Music). Admittedly, having Robert Fripp contribute guitar to anything immediately guarantees it can’t be relegated to the background for long, and the big solo at the second half of “Evening Star” is a prime example of that. Still, the first half of the song, when it’s just layers and layers of gentle guitars washing over each other, that’s prime vintage ambient. And the very fact that it’s a guitar rather than just some notes on a synth keyboard held down for a looooong time allow it to stand apart from other songs of its vintage.  “Evening Star” sounds just like the nature montage in a kid’s educational short. Or a movie trailer. Actually, has this song every been in a real movie trailer? Snark aside, it really sounds like it should have been.

Next up we have “Stepping Stars” by David Arkenstone, a guy who’s done so many soundtracks over the years that I probably should have saved my crack about movie trailers for this bit. “Stepping Stars” itself has never been on an actual soundtrack that I know of (coming instead from his debut Valley in the Clouds) but I would be shocked if David Wise didn’t listen to this song at least once before creating “Aquatic Ambiance” for Donkey Kong Country, since it sounds a bit like every underwater level ever. I’d love to also add that it sounds like the soundtrack to any montage of shots in space, or even a planetarium show, but I have to save THAT joke for later, because…

The next track is “A Gentle Rain of Starlight” by Geodesium, which sounds EXACTLY like yje soundtrack to a planetarium show because that’s literally what it is. Keyboardist Mark C. Peterson has made a career out of professionally scoring planetarium presentations for four decades now, and I’m more than a little jealous of anybody who gets to but that on their resume. It sounds exactly like what you’d think it would: lots of slow, dramatic bass drones laying a foundation for epic, ethereal synth riff and lots of electronic chimes tinkling somewhere in the distance. This is one of the songs that really, REALLY deserve the “New Age” moniker. Under other circumstances, I might even compare it to one of the token original tracks that fill out a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album. I can’t though, because…

Our next track is “The Chakra 4 of the Body” by, you guessed it, Mannheim Steamroller. Yup, every shopping mall’s favorite holiday artist makes music for the other eleven months of the year, and this is one of them. Part of an extended suite on the seven charkras (itself part of the larger theme of Fresh Aire 7 making every track somehow “seven” related), “Chakra 4” sounds, well, exactly like you’d think a non-holiday Mannheim Steamroller song would sound. Which is to say, almost identical to the actual holiday ones. Built upon a bed of fairy tale vibes and topped off with gobs and gobs of wordless children’s choir vocalizing, all this song needs is some jingle bells and a title that references The North Pole and absolutely COULD fit on one of the Christmas albums. Dub it over any holiday special where the kids see Santa’s workshop for the first time, it totally works.

Next up, and even deeper into the New Age rabbit hole, is “Glass Green” by Tim Story. And before you ask: no, it’s not the same Tim Story as the guy who did those Fantastic Four movies. This is a different one. If there’s any one track on Sophia’s soundtrack that sounds like it absolutely DOES belong in the background of some middleaged west coast hipster doing yoga, it’s this one. And yet, despite mostly being a series of electronic waves of sound meant to wash over the listener without drawing attention to itself, there IS a clear, memorable melody. Atop all the drones and swooshes, there a chipper little synth melody that, given a livelier backing, would honestly sound a lot like “Pleasure in Progress” up top. Think of this as the eerie reprise of the happy opening mall montage, playing when the main character has to sneak around the empty mall after hours.

Another selection that takes my “soundtrack” analogy extra literally, “In The Blue Distance” is by Mark Isham, who’s been all over movie and TV soundtracks for decades now (another track of the album Vapor Drawings, “On the Threshold of Liberty” is particularly ubiquitous). “In The Blue Distance” sounds like a lost Blade Runner track, only with an actual piano instead of a Casio and a trumpet instead of a saxophone. Either way, it’s a nice, atmospheric bit of neo-noir. Oh, and Mark Isham was also a member of Group 87, that supergroup that also included…

Peter Maunu! We finish where we began with another Maunu track, this one off of Windam Hill’s Guitar Sampler, that’s just layers and layers of echoy guitars and guitar synthesizers. It’s too focused and melodic to fit in with the more overtly New Age tracks, but ethereal enough to at least wrap things up after several of them. Really, this is the sort of song that plays during the closing credits, filling out the remaining few minutes after the big award bait song is finished.

So… why all this? Why does Sophia listen this hodgepodge of late 80s-early 90s instrumental songs? I mean, besides the ACTUAL reason that this is just one of the types of music I like and Sophia is one of the characters vaguely defined enough that I could get way with assigning whatever musical tastes I wanted to her. ASIDE from that, these are all carefully crafted, immaculately polished studio creations, and I’d imagine someone as detail-oriented as a high ranking official in a major Nitpicking organization would prefer music that’s especially well groomed. And even if the connection didn’t quite come together in the right order, the bit about Sophia watching “old employee training videos” is actually quite fitting for her. Why WOULDN’T a professional Nitpicker, a person who points out things that are wrong for a living, go to films about how to do things right as a form of relaxation? And why wouldn’t that enjoyment spill over to the type of stock music that turns up in those videos? …well, there’s the fact that I’m just assuming that some point in the distant future still has a “several decades ago” that’s culturally and artistically comparable to our own. That’s… actually extremely lazy of me, isn’t it?

(As if there weren’t enough reasons already for me to get this done faster, the video selection for this playlist would have been a LOT easier to put together a while ago. I couldn’t tell when exactly it happened, but several videos I’d tracked down as unofficial posts up and vanished by the time this blog finally rolled around. “Flightplan,” “Evening Star,” and “Cheyenne” had all either been taken down or at least blocked in my region by the time I started typing this up, on that unofficial level, at least. For “Flightplan” and “Evening Star,” I could still find official YouTube Music postings, and in both those cases the regional restrictions were a lot lighter than I’ve been used to seeing. You’re still out of luck if you wanna view these videos in most of Africa, but longstanding blocked regions like Australia, Russia, and Japan seem to be all clear now. Hopefully, that covers anybody who’ll ever actually see these soundtrack posts. “Cheyenne,” on the other hand, was a tougher one to deal with. Try as I might, I just couldn’t find a single accessible YouTube posting of the thing, not even an official one. I guess because it’s from an old compilation rather than a full album it’s fallen through the cracks of the reissue machine, and Late 80s Easy Listening doesn’t exactly have as big a community of archivists as other genres, so it’s not not there. Good thing that mysterious Ichabod Kendall account that I totally have nothing to do with just so happened to post an unlisted video of it! Yup, while that video I used to filling the blanks of Vengeance’s playlist did end up getting claimed –because why wouldn’t it, I don’t OWN that song– it never actually got a full-on copyright strike, so the thing’s still technically up. So I decided to push my luck and try again, at least for the one song where I absolutely had no other choice. Oh, and I think I’ve commented on this before, but I remain amused by the fact that the YouTube Music videos are blocked in Greenland, but NOT Denmark, despite Denmark running Greenland. Man was not meant to know how these weird copyright logistics work.)

Sophia's YouTube Soundtrack