Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

[houston]

I've been meaning to release it into the wild for the two months half a year. (time flies lol) I've had it on my hands, but I've been unable to find anyone to do some spectral analysis and verify its authenticity. (So basically, I'm still not sure whether it's legit. Would be great if some of you guys might know how to figure that out.)
Here is a lossless release of "Methods of Destruction". Sonic Mayhem's 1996 debut album and alternative fan soundtrack to Quake, its musical portfolio would contribute to their collaboration with id Software to conceive Quake II's soundtrack and part of Quake III's soundtrack.

 

This album was popularly considered lost until 2012, when a choppy MP3 release of it appeared on a Steam thread. After Sascha Dikiciyan of Sonic Mayhem expressed his wishes to keep his earliest work away from peoples' ears (I really can't understand why. I think the stuff is great except for maybe the opening track), the uploader quickly deleted it. However this release would proliferate itself across the internet causing Sascha to eventually throw in the towel and begrudgingly give Kevin Sartori his blessing to release a cleaned-up distribution of that MP3 release.
A bit over a month has passed since Quake II Remastered was released, and I haven't heard any whispers of an official re-release of this album, so personally I can confidently consider it disowned abandonware.

 

Here's some additional links which can clarify the background of this album and its abandonment/availability status:
https://searx.tiekoetter.com/search?q=site:quaddicted.com+"methods+of+destruction"
The Quaddicted wiki article
The Steam thread
An archive of Kevin Sartori's article and release on his rare music blog
Parts of these articles refer to the album having been made available in 2012, this is in regards to the inferior MP3 release.

 

The old official track listing calls the first track "Data Track" for title consistency with the equivalent track on the Quake II disc, but if my release is legit, this data doesn't exist. It's just a 30-second loop of silence, just like what you'd hear on some custom Quake maps when they load "Track 1". I can't say I'm not a tiny bit disappointed by that, but it makes sense. There's plenty of CD players out there which don't know they're meant to skip this data, so sneaking a little text file or something into there isn't worth potentially compromising the listening experience for those buyers.

Edited September 30, 2023 by houston
the cruel passage of time

[Rudolph]

"The-The-The Tough Guys... Who Came... To Kill... But Stayed... To Rape... And Ravage..."

 

I enjoy that album, but I still do not understand what he meant to say with those lyrics. XD

[houston]

Yeah, that one's a bit of an oddball. It's punkish and an okay listen, but vocals in general are a little weird for a title screen track and the sample is nearly as ridiculous as the lyrics on some of Nine Inch Nail's actual songs.

[Rudolph]

I know the "Your Feeling of Helplessness Is Your Best Friend, Savage" voice clip is from the movie The Brain From Planet Arous; Frank Klepacki also used it for the track "Brain Freeze" in Yuri's Revenge soundtrack. I have no idea where the "rape... and ravage" clip comes from, however.

[houston]

Looked into it, it appears to be from the trailer of a 1967 sexual (pornographic?) thriller film called "A Taste of Flesh": https://www.imdb.com/video/vi4273209625/. It seems like a lot of songs have sampled it, but curiously (and without looking very hard) I haven't noticed any from before Methods of Destruction. I'm probably wrong, but apparently different sections of this album have (supposedly) been sampled in e.g. the Half-Life soundtrack, so it wouldn't be the only time the album's been sampled but it would probably be the most significant.

Edited September 30, 2023 by houston

[Rudolph]

Wow. How did you do that? I previously tried to google the quote with quotations marks, but could not find anything relevant. Well, at least, that is one mystery resolved. Thanks!

 

As for Methods of Destruction, I might try to use it as a soundtrack replacement for one of the later episodes. If I do not find a way to edit the game files accordingly, I might as well just play it in the background on a music player while playing Quake, like in the good old days...

[houston]

The query I gave my search engine was `"the tough guys who came to kill" -nomadic' (Slipknot results kept coming up). Just had to scroll down until I saw a forum thread saying it must be from a movie trailer, and down slightly further until an IMDB page came up.

 

12 hours ago, Rudolph said:

If I do not find a way to edit the game files accordingly

That part's simple, you just rename your "music" folder in your Quake's data store to something else, make a new one and drop the MoD flacs in, renaming them to "track01.flac", "track02.flac" and stuff. Your source port might not support FLAC so you might have to convert it to .ogg or something first. If you're playing the original DOS game, mount the bin+cue ordinarily, whether that's by burning it to a CD, or virtually mounting it in your VM/DOSBox. In the second case you might be able to mount the FLACs even, not sure.

 

Remember, "Welcome to Mayhem" is track02, not track01. track01 is "Data Track" and you can choose to omit it entirely, since it's just 30 seconds of silence.

 

Just since I forgot to make a note of it elsewhere, these tracks all blend into eachother by one second. I'm pretty sure it's like that on the original disc, but the touched-up MP3 release from a while back fixes this issue. Based on your preference it might be good if somebody eventually "fixes" that on these FLACs.

[Rudolph]

@houston Thanks, but what I meant is figuring out a way to make MoD play for a specific episode, so that they do not all reuse the same vanilla soundtrack. However, I seem to remember being told that this is just not possible. If so, then I guess I can always just turn off the in-game soundtrack and have MoD play in the background.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Rudolph

[houston]

Oh yeah, there'll be no "easy" way of doing that aside from editing the levels and including MoD as tracks 12-20.

Quakespasm and probably other source ports removed this, but normal Quake has a "cd info" command which would at least tell you which track is currently playing (and other stuff like, e.g. what volume: 0), not all that important of a feature but I bet it would have made your life a bit easier. @Rudolph

[janiform]

@houston @Rudolph FYI, not only the b-movie samples but guitar riffs and other elements of Methods of Destruction are from a popular 1990s loop CD called "Methods of Mayhem: Industrial Toolkit". I won't link it here, but if you search the internet you will find it. I had this CD in the 90s and was surprised to find loops used by White Zombie, Fear Factory, Pig, etc. I'm sure it was also used on other game soundtracks.

 

Edit: Apparently this CD was used for the Half Life soundtrack too: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life_soundtrack

Edited December 2, 2023 by janiform

[Rudolph]

"Methods of Mayhem"... Ha! I see what he did there. :P

[june gloom]

I remember a website that had a lot of obscure albums, including this. I've always liked MoD and thought it was a great album to listen to on its own.