“Stickerbush Symphony”

Trending Now

xaviersobased Rates TikTok, Bushwick, and Chopped Cheese

Throughout the 2010s, the YouTube algorithm would summon a mysterious transmission. Uploaded in 2012 by a user named “taia777,” the video featured a 15-minute loop of David Wise’s “Stickerbush Symphony” over a cascading image of thorn bushes in the sky, taken from the levels scored by the song in the 1995 Super Nintendo (SNES) game Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. This video appeared like an apparition to thousands of users, and the title was spelled in Kanji, making it difficult to rediscover on your own. The first “internet checkpoint,” as it became known, had to visit you.

When it did, users took it upon themselves to write sentimental passages to Wise’s sentimental score, reflecting in the comments on triumphs, tragedies, and affirmations on addiction, grief, or simply being stuck in life. More than any other song from a Super Nintendo game, “Stickerbush” seems to have a therapeutic purpose. It appears when our chaotic lives need serenity, when carrying on means taking a moment to reflect.

Wise could never have anticipated the song becoming the anthem for the internet’s collective memory, but it was always intended to soothe chaos, both in his life and inside the game itself. Rareware (now Rare Limited), the British developer of the DKC trilogy, carved out an unprecedented niche in the fourth generation of console gaming, transcending standard 16-bit graphics with unreal pre-rendered 3D animations and backgrounds. These games were phenomenally designed, full of cheeky British wit and personality. They were also hard as hell, and Donkey Kong Country 2 was the most difficult. Almost left on the cutting room floor, Wise’s composition was chosen at the last second to score the game’s ridiculously difficult “bramble” levels: The song’s capacity for healing made the effort of trying and failing at these levels again and again feel worth it.

Pushing the SNES to its technical limits was practically an employee requirement while working at Rareware. As their most ambitious composer, Wise set his sights on the console’s SPC700 sound chip, maximizing its potential by conceiving an inventive, maddeningly strenuous composition process. The majority of SNES composers took a standardized route of composition, using a shared pool of MIDI instruments alongside Nintendo’s lent-out development tools. The SPC could easily recognize and process these sounds, and an entire score could snuggly fit within the tiny 64kb of allotted space. Wise knew that these hackneyed tools would get him nowhere.

Instead, he coded his own instruments from scratch, altering their pitches, lengths, and timbres second-by-second in a tracker with hexadecimal code. On an actual synth, like the Korg Wavestation, it takes a split second to write and record a series of complex notes with varying timbres. Wise’s coding meant it took days, sometimes weeks, to do the same. He felt “frustrated all the time,” but he kept pushing. By the time he got to “Stickerbush,” the arduous process was “mastered,” in that he no longer had to play refrains on a keyboard first: He’d code them directly from his hums.

Wise got exactly what he wanted: a compressed, grainy palette of instrumental textures, ghostly versions of the day’s weapons-grade synths. Fitting his divergent cast of sounds into such a little space meant becoming a master of instrumental ambiguity, the type of composer/programmer able to make a lead guitar waveform sound like a harmonica. The second half of “Stickerbush” features a “piano solo,” at least that’s what the stinging, sentimental keys sound like. What we’re actually hearing is a heavily modified dulcimer preset.

Some passages feature instruments with so much coded ambiguity that they’d transcend the tangible and turn sublime. What exactly is that otherworldly lead bridging into the song’s midpoint and bookending its call-and-response outro? Turns out, it’s an emulation of the Wavestation’s alto sax and muted trumpet presets, but Wise makes it sound like the faint score of a dream or a long-gone memory. Tethered to Wise’s melancholic songwriting, these unearthly leads paint the back-and-forth of major and minor chords with unknown textures from another world—just familiar enough to make us reflect on ours.

Wise’s compositional signature—his mastery of sustain and tension—crowds the mix. He coded background synth pads that cut like knives across a spectrum of grain-soaked resonance: sometimes soft, sometimes sharp, sometimes soaring across this spectrum. The opening riff of “Stickerbush” is underscored by a synth that starts low but slowly inflates higher, like a balloon floating heavenward. The central chord progression’s pads and low-end synths begin at low volumes and swell upward as that resonant grain bites into the mix, the latter doing so with gate and delay effects before spiralling back downward. These additional effects are entirely simulated. In a beautiful compromise you can observe via oscilloscope, Wise saved memory by playing a single instrument in multiple channels slightly offset from each other, creating his own improvised versions of gates, echos, and reverb.

Take one listen to “Stickerbush”’s fan-made “restored” version and you’ll understand why these compositional limitations are so integral. Here, the instruments appear uncompressed and reproduced through FL Studio. Wise’s wistful songwriting is retained, but completely missing is his intentionally impure palette. The instrumentation turns flat and unimaginative. Once-heavensent piano timbres are suddenly as ordinary as any run-of-the-mill ’90s new age track; the alto sax lead actually sounds like an alto sax, losing its unreal texture. Wise’s essential deployment of tension is absent without the compressed grain that elevates it. The idea of restoration is a “misnomer,” Wise said. He always meant for the song to be tethered to the restrictions of the SNES; he wanted to make limited sounds feel limitless. Like the comments section of the internet checkpoint, “Stickerbush” is a living time capsule.

Despite the beautifully compressed lexicon he invented, Wise has stated he’d never return to this composing process. Shortly after the game’s release, it was already archaic. Six years later, the sixth generation of consoles ushered in unprecedented CD audio sound technology, a far cry from the 64kb of space on SNES cartridges. Since then, efforts have been made to reproduce the sounds and textures of Wise’s palette. We have the DKC2 soundfont, which rips the audio files from the game and repackages them into MIDI emulations, able to be played on a keyboard or digital audio workstation. These files have the “vibe” of Wise’s score but are not 1:1 replications. We also have impressive plugins like Plogue’s “chipsynth SFC,” which lets you program sounds yourself that emulate the general textures of Wise’s work.

Walter Benjamin would call it as it is: Reproducibility is not the same as replication. We can’t replicate the specific grainy bliss of “Stickerbush,” because Wise’s compressed lexicon is the product of a process reserved to a specific time, place, and technique. There’s a reason why Wise’s DKC work is a staple of modern sampling: from Yung Lean to Drake and hundreds more. The constricted fruits born from his process are often more ripe than any modern synth’s capabilities. When we’re visited by “Stickerbush” today—whether in a mysterious YouTube video or on xaviersobased’s latest album—it’s a reminder that Wise’s lexicon is both frozen in time and eternal.

In 2021, Nintendo—who for decades has capitalized on the nostalgia of a song they own but didn’t create with numerous remixes—issued a DMCA takedown of taia777’s original video, an attempt to rip “Stickerbush” and all of the “checkpoint” entries out of their respective time capsules. But these memories, maybe your checkpoint included, were saved. Before the takedown, the video and its comments section were scraped and publicly archived by a user called Rebane2001, and they were subsequently chronicled in Ruby Justice Thelot’s 2023 book, A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints. “Forget what you’ve lost, save what you can,” Rebane2001 told Thelot, wisdom that echoes “Stickerbush”’s prospective purpose: looking back can mean moving forward. When we listen to Wise’s masterpiece today, when it blesses us with a reflective calm inside our 21st century storm, we witness how specters of the past can help us reason with our present, providing us a sanctuary where we can settle down and understand what we want our futures to be.