Boston-based rock group Horse Jumper of Love creates the type of music you may want to play in your hyperbaric chamber if you were there for an extended period and wanted to fully immerse yourself in the experience.
A piercingly plonking guitar riff and the lyrics “And there is dirt and there is juice / and I am mixing up the two” are the foundation of one of their best songs, “DIRT,” from 2019. I have no idea what that means. I’m not sure if I should. Their latest album, Natural Part, features a ton of similarly confusing lyrics in its odd slowcore arrangements.
Dimitri Giannopoulos, the band’s leader, justified the album’s title track in a recent interview with Jordan Darville of The Fader by saying, “The tone of the guitar always reminds me of playing The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.” It was puzzling once more, but it felt like a peek inside their thought process. Was that the secret to the alchemy of this amazing band? music from videogames?
Giannopoulos and HJOL bassist John Margaris use Zoom to communicate from the bed of a generic chain hotel somewhere in the South. Both of them have lovely long hair and friendly smiles. Margaris also sports a robust mustache. Both of them are excited to talk about game music. “My childhood playing video games did maybe start my music career,” he says. “Without AC/DC’s High Voltage I wouldn’t have gotten into rock ‘n’ roll.”
It was Mario 64 and Mario Party 3 for the N64 for Margaris. “You don’t realize you’re listening to almost fusion-y kind of music. Being able to listen to something over and over and not get bored—that was a new experience.” The score writers were “using such limited technology, it’s insane what they were able to do.” Which reminds Giannopoulos of a favorite meme, about the underwater level from Donkey Kong. Beaming just at the thought, he rephrases: “Guy hired to write score for swimming gorilla accidentally writes best ambient album of all time.” Which then leads them to talk about various subterranean video game levels and how trippy the music cues in those shifting landscapes can be. “They’re huge mood changers,” Margaris says, intentionally or not, echoing what his band does so well.
Both of them are Boston natives who recall their “split-screen hangs,” or times spent playing games like Goldeneye in friends’ basements and living rooms, with nostalgia. That is a significant portion of their common musical vocabulary.
“I don’t know a lot of music theory,” Giannopoulos says, “but I do know a lot of pop culture stuff. Straight up I’ll be like, ‘John, do a bass line that sounds like’ [insert something from their youth].” There’s also an Instagram account that Giannopoulos loves that posts songs from “really weird and rare Japanese video games from the ’90s, lots of cool crazy acid house stuff or rave-ish music, and some of them are insanely good,” Giannopoulos says. He sends them to Margalis all the time. Sums up Margalis: “They’re wicked bizarre.”
Which brings Giannopoulos back to his point about Zelda and “The Natural Part.”
“The tone of the guitar has that shimmering chorus effect and that always makes me feel nostalgic. There’s some song in Ocarina of Time, and that exact tone reminded me of it … maybe that, or when Link is, like, in the village in the beginning?” Jauntily, Margalis starts humming the Zelda bit, as he remembers it: “Dun dun dun, dun dun dun, dun-dun-dun-dun.”
“Yeah, that!” Giannopoulos says. “The melody I don’t think is the same, but the tone of that little line and the guitar. For some reason”—he points two index fingers to his head—“that clicked in my mind. I didn’t go into the song being like, ‘I wanna write a song that sounds like Legend of Zelda,’ but after it’s done it just connects to all different kinds of memories.” Adds Margalis, “It might not necessarily sound like the score, but it felt like that.”
For most of their childhood, video games served as a dependable cultural steward, but both men are now more dabblers in the field. Giannopoulos played a brief game of Skyrim. One was with Mass Effect for Margalis. They have been discussing purchasing a Nintendo Switch for their travels. But to be honest, their interactions with video games were in direct opposition to how they interacted with music. The songs’ covert source of inspiration was video games. The songs also replaced the games during high school, when they started to take their profession seriously.
“Once I started getting really into music,” Giannapolous says, “I stopped playing video games. You’re always looking for something to lose yourself in. And music has been that for me ever since.”
