"Northern Hemispheres" from Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1994)
Composer: Eveline Fischer
Album: DK Jamz: The Original Donkey Kong Country Soundtrack
Label: Nintendo of America
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Rare
Like a lot of the music in Donkey Kong Country, you do not often hear the song unbroken all of the way through by the time you finish the stage, be it because the stages are sometimes not long enough to hear the entire song, while more often than not, the song is broken up by entering bonus stages. The first instance of "Northern Hemispheres" is in the first stage, Snow Barrel Blast in the Gorilla Glacier stage, and it is only a couple of seconds before you can enter your first bonus stage, and as is the case in Donkey Kong Country when you emerge from said bonus stage, the song itself resets.
There are some telltale music cues in "Northern Hemispheres" although most of the sense of cold I get from this song is primarily from the nostalgia goggles that tell me a multi-layered blizzard is about to descend upon me while slipping around snow-capped peaks. The higher-toned piano notes make me think of a glass xylophone, there are some jingly-bell-like tones scattered throughout, and the glissando-ing high-pitched synthesizer-like-instrument (around 1:19) at least for me, for whatever reason, invokes a feeling of cold. So I do recognize that while there are a few elements from this song that would be found in stereotypical music for an ice or snow world, a lot of the reason for its including today is because I have fond (and agonizing) memories of Gorilla Glacier and this song playing over some of the best snow and blizzard effects in an SNES era video game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Rise Another Day Across the Distant Skies
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