Aquatic Ambience From Donkey Kong Country Is The Perfect SNES Chill Track

When you get home from a long day at work or in the classroom, you want to relax, and that might involve putting on some relaxing and soothing tunes to help you unwind. Maybe you decide to put on some John Coltrane and let the smooth Jazz sounds that emit from his saxophone take you away to a state of pure bliss, or kick back with one of those smooth lo-fi playlists on YouTube. For me, nothing melts the world away quite like Aquatic Ambience, the music track from the water level in Donkey Kong Country.

The song uses a heavy diet of synth-styled instruments and reverbs to create a serene underwater experience. Separated from the game – but perhaps tinged by fondness for the game – the song is introspective and reflective, and wouldn’t be a bad backing track for a meditation session. The song was made possible by the Super Nintendo’s S-SMP sound chip. Its composer David Wise – who composed the soundtrack for the Donkey Kong Country series and other Rare titles – shared his appreciation for the sound chip in an interview with Game Informer.

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“It was refreshing all of a sudden to have a decent sound chip that actually sounded like music and have a year to work on the soundtrack,” Wise later added, “I spent about five weeks putting this [Aquatic Ambience] together just to see if the technology would work.” The famed British composer also mentioned not using MIDI – Musical Instrument Digital Interface – as it wasn’t available at the time, so he had to enter all of the notes and ideas for other songs using a keyboard and through various coding techniques.

Donkey Kong Country - Aquatic Ambience [Restored] OLD MIXDonkey Kong Country - Aquatic Ambience [Restored] OLD MIX

The Super Nintendo’s S-SMP chip, which was made by Sony, gave composers the opportunity to use a bigger arsenal of samples and mixes. Wise compared the feeling to that of a dog being let off the leash. The chip had a 9-bit audio format but its 64 KB of SRAM made only eight channels available; that was still enough to give let Wise use longer audio samples and be more experimental, though the samples still had to be on the smaller side. Aquatic Ambience was Wise’s way of testing the capabilities of the SNES sound chip.

Wise used a guitar, synthy flute, violin piano, harp, and other instruments to give Aquatic Ambience its iconic sound. It’s an interesting contrast to another classic aquatic track, Dire Dire Docks from Super Mario 64, the latter being a bit more upbeat towards the middle where snare and kick drums are being used to increase the tempo. The synth stylings of Aquatic Ambience and its use of strings make it more mellow throughout and when you hear the guitar strum, only the latter part of it is used. This gives the song more of a subaquatic sound and feel.

At no point does the song’s tempo pick up, it remains calm throughout its entire length and gently lays different instruments and sound effects over each other like a parent putting a blanket over their sleeping child, thus giving you a sensation of being surrounded by water, and one with your thoughts.

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