Some of my favorite pieces of music from the Zelda series are truly bonkers. I have a special place for the wildest Zelda tracks in my music library, but one of them I added on accident; I am surprised and disoriented every time the track “Twilit Battle” plays in a shuffle. Among the wild tracks in Twilight Princess — and there are many — the music that plays when you fight enemies in the Twilight-covered regions of Hyrule takes the cake as the most bizarre.
I legitimately have no idea how composers Toru Minegishi and Asuka Ohta conceived the “Twilit Battle” theme. I’ve tried to parse it, but it really has no internal logic. There are brief pockets that seem to follow a melodic pattern, but these are immediately counteracted by pure insanity. A YouTube commenter put it bluntly, calling this music “the sound of a hundred bees farting beans into your ears.” (By some miracle of patience, Eric Christensen was able to notate the “Twilit Battle” music. You can find his transcription by clicking on this link here.)
The battle cue only makes sense when taken as a whole and in its context. We only ever hear this cacophonous bombardment when fighting Shadow enemies. For the most part, Shadow enemies almost resemble their Light World counterparts. The Shadow Kargarok, for example, almost resembles a Kargarok from The Wind Waker: it has wings, flies, and attacks in the same way as a Kargarok, but it makes distorted, trumpet-like sounds, its colors are sapped away, and it has a notable lack of head. In short, the Shadow enemies in Twilight Princess uncannily resemble creatures we’re accustomed to from the series.
The “Twilit Battle” musically embodies this uncanniness. It almost resembles coherent musical ideas, but inevitably makes no sense and puts us on edge. The use of stereo sound makes the track even harder to follow as the barrage of nonsense pitches is juggled from one ear to the other. Even if our ears can get used to the binaural racket, our focus is interrupted by seemingly random stings that pierce through the texture. These stings are unnatural in their own right, sounding like a tape recording played in reverse.
The combined uncanniness of the track and its focus on keeping us disoriented perfectly mirror the nature of the Twilight Realm and the unsettling monsters that occupy it.
Two other tracks in Twilight Princess add layers over the “Twilit Battle” cue. The “Shadow Beast Battle,” for one, adds a regular percussive beat that lends a sense of militaristic vigor. This makes sense given fights against Shadow Beasts are more consequential than the typical Twilit battle and since these enemies are Twili corrupted into the horrifying soldiers of the Usurper King Zant.
My absolute favorite variant of the “Twilit Battle” music appears in the battle against the Twilit Bloat that bookends the Shadow Insect/Tears of Light plot line. This middle boss is by all regards one of the most disgusting enemies in the entire Zelda series. With nasty, writhing tentacles that serve as its weak spots, this gargantuan isopod brings the eww factor to 11. Pill bugs may be cute in the Animal Crossing series, but Twilight Princess‘s massive aberration is downright grotesque.
The music for the cue begins in the cutscene that introduces the fight. As bubbles rise to the top of Lake Hylia and the Twilit Bloat breaches the surface, a rising chromatic line accompanies the scene, recalling John Williams’s foreboding theme for Jaws.
The ludicrous “Twilit Battle” bass line erupts as Wolf Link uses his senses to see the giant Shadow Insect, and we’re treated to a new melody that is as absurd as it is simple. The “Shadow Insect Battle” cue’s principal musical building block is the tritone: a highly dissonant harmony historically associated with evil and the profane. In this instance, though, it doesn’t seem to communicate evil so much as its dissonance reflects the disgustingness of our roly-poly enemy. As two synthesized French horns play a tritone apart from one another, the trombone and hammered dulcimer jump between these dissonant pitches. The anxiety and grotesqueness are escalated when the melody modulates up and a reverb-heavy synth starts to echo the tritone jumps.
In case we forgot that the enemy we’re fighting was corrupted by Zant and the Twilight Realm, the track ends with call-and-response iterations of the seven-note Twilight theme before looping.
Even though they scare me every time they play in my shuffle, I love the “Twilit Battle” and “Shadow Insect” music. They’re incomprehensible and absurd, but they beautifully demonstrate the storytelling and character-forming capabilities of music. Visually, it’s obvious that the enemies in Twilight-covered Hyrule are gross and bizarre, but the music drives this home, reinforcing the uncanniness and the combined grotesquerie by distorting well-known musical gestures into unintelligible chaos.
