#also. theres a bit in the score that i SWEAR sounds like jane's a car but ISN'T and it's driving me bonkers

[aibafiles]

just picked up a fun little thing on my hatchetfield leitmotif hunt! matt dahan has several musical ideas floating around nightmare time that aren't tied to any character or idea in particular, just used to set the mood, one of which i've nicknamed "spooky arpeggio" (proper name pending) in my doc. we hear it here and there, typically with little variation other than instrumentation (traditional acoustic piano sound versus more synthy electric piano) - here's a good example of it timestamped: (@ 1:08:29)

I was content for that to be all it was - a recurring bit of ambient music for a specific mood - when I noticed this later on in time bastard: (1:30:08)

it's an upbeat variation on that same arpeggio - we've got a transforming idea on our hands! i haven't finished dissecting the entire nmt score yet so i can't say for sure that this is the only instance of it, but i think it's very interesting that the first time we hear a tonal difference, it's before shit goes wrong and the timelines split, as if this is the original form of this theme and it's about to get warped into the spooky hatchetfield music we know.

i don't know that this was intentional on matt's part, given that (iirc) nmt1's score was largely improvised because of the live nature of it. but, intentional or not, it's a part of the musical narrative and i'm having a fucking ball reading into it

(time bastard also establishes a leitmotif for tinky that i think may have also been intended for kilgore because good god it is everywhere - and it gets a little callback in killer track when holloway mentions him!)