Plake 64 & the Hexagrams - Ultima Materia

 


Released: October 2


Ultima Materia has a lot of the aesthetics that you might expect at first glance. There is definitely that lo-fi electronic quality that is reminiscent of the early days of DOS, Amiga, and even Commodore computing. But there a bit more to it than that. A sonic adventure broken into two parts, the tones hearken back to those days of early RPG gaming but with that not quite nostalgic feeling and and hefty amount of glitchy noise. Starting out on “Ultima” (the first half of this adventure) we are greeted with fast moving tones that are clipped up and stuttered in an odd rhythmic way but still carry some measure of melody with them.  The glitching and heavy effects fade away as we move closer to the end with weird reappearances throughout. But it’s an interesting balance between the competing sounds with the strange and glitchy twisting up the cleaner and more pad driven parts. It kind of feels like a moment in which you are playing a game but your machine can’t handle it all that well, just well enough for you to keep playing with moderate ease. 

“Materia” makes up the second half and follows mostly the same kind of motif. The cleaner and less affected sections stood out a bit more to me compared to the first half. Just about at the halfway point, the music sounds quite dramatic and maybe even a little over-enthusiastic. But I loved the moment especially as it reminded me of those overworld kind of tunes in an RPG, the ones where you’ve gotten the ability to move from town to town in a larger map which usually means you’re on your way to the wilder parts of the story. But then this disappears after a few min,utes and leaves its some real strange stuff that sounds interesting but diverges far from that retro game vibes it started on. Here, distorted voices and hollow sounds turn this adventure into a rather creepy one until the adventure vibes come back near the very end. It’s a fun ride, one that I listened to a few times for good measure.  



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