"Snake Charmer", by jegasus

Lore

Your back presses up against the wall. You hold your sword tight with your right hand, shield in your left. You are further into the Snake Charmer's lair than you ever believed was possible. You have fought so many monsters... So many half human half animal monstrocities.... You are the last standing member from your adventuring party and you are thirsty for revenge. You know the sorcerer's magical powers are not to be trifled with, but you also know that you can ward his hypnotic draw by blocking your ears.

You hear the evil sorcerer in his chambers, laughing maniacally to himself. There are also weird noises coming from inside the chamber. What is he doing in there? You muster up the courage to peek inside. The wretch is lying on his divan, half clothed holding in his hands a little black rectangular device. And it's... Making music? Nonsense.

You steel yourself. You jam your ears full of cotton to the point where you can barely hear a thing except some muffled rustling. You down a healing potion, an elixir of heroism, a potion of speed, take a deep breath and run inside, yelling at the top of your lungs: "DIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!!"

As soon as you step inside, a high pitched noise pierces through the cotton. A flute! Oh, how pretty it sounds... You wonder what comes next in the tune. You barely notice, but your dash has slowed down to a march and your footsteps are lining up with the tune. And your hands are empty - you see your sword and shield on the ground, several paces behind you.

The Snake Charmer places the little musical rectangle down on the table next to him, the little thing still bleep-blooping its magical tune with enough power to reverberate across the four walls of this massive room. "How is that even possible?", you muse. He walks towards you with a huge grin on his face, takes your left hand and says: "Oh, I'm so happy you came! I haven't had company in ages!!! Come, dance with me!"

And you do.

Production details

This is my submission to the 19th M8 Community Jam! The theme was "Sorcery" and the optional challenge was "Incorporate sounds from vintage tech (does not have to be music equipment)".

I wasn't sure how to incorporate the "vintage tech" aspect of this jam, so I decided to keep it simple - I'll consider that using chromatic samples from classic musical instruments would count. Fortunately, I recently stumbled upon a bunch of samples from the University of Iowa's Electronic Music Studios, which fit exactly what I was looking for.

For the theme, I was at a bit of a loss until I thought about a snake charmer who uses a flute to hypnotize their prey. So I loaded up the flute samples and came up with a little melody that, when repeated, sounds a bit hypnotic. I just kept building things up from there and arrived at this!

I feel that I have once again fallen into the trap of making something super repetitive, but I feel I'm getting better at making things at least less monotonous.

This was all done on the Dirtywave M8 Tracker using none of its internal synths - this tune is samples all the way down.