Dear Reader:
Kid Koala discusses his work on the Floor Kids soundtrack
A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with Kid Koala, composer for Floor Kids...
NL: Floor Kids’ soundtrack is phenomenal, and it’s such a huge part of the experience — can you tell us about the musical influences that went into it?
Kid Koala: Thank you for the kind words. I’m glad you enjoyed the music! I’ve been doing more film soundtrack and scoring work in recent years, so I kind of applied that “score to picture” mentality to Floor Kids. JonJon’s art style is very raw and scratchy, so I just tried to make music that would fit the visual world that he created. I pretty much used everything in my studio and tried to make tracks that had the energy of the bboy/bgirl events that I’ve deejayed at over the years. I have a vinyl cutting machine in my studio, so often I would play the instruments and then cut them on to vinyl to re-scratch them back into the track. That way you get that turntable push/pull and record dust into the mix, which I love. I got to use equipment from every era because I’m a bit of a gear geek. Jon drew a venue that’s an old school video arcade, so I brought out the Commodore SID chip, 4 bit, 8 bit, synths for that. By the time the player gets to the Peace Summit, I wanted the music to feel like some insane “Final Boss Battle”. I laughed a lot making those tracks also (sometimes maniacally) because the chorus sections are ridiculously difficult. During the menu music and story cut scenes, I made more mid-tempo tracks just give a little break from the uptempo battle tracks.