Damn, I believe this one will be my pick for the jam.
Great sense of atmosphere overall, flawless use of percussion elements, honestly Sand and Towers is an amazing track, its one of the best ambient tracks I personally heard, and i mean outside the jam, so congrats!
I would question some sound design choices on the second track, It's not the mix, that is pretty top notch, but I feel quite a loss of intensity from one to the other, but of course this could have been your intention all along (all long, all along), but with no referreance to it on the description I had to point it out.
Anyway, amazing submission! Take care :3
I'm glad you really enjoyed them!
The first track, "Sand and Towers", is the better of the two. It's the one I set up with the hopes that if people only listened to the first track of my submission that they would get the best of what's being presented. I made an effort to keep it atmosphereic and texture based while holding a structure (5/4 122bpm) that would be listenable by the overall participants of the jam, many of who I wouldn't expect to hear something purely ambient and atmosphereic and rate it highly. More importantly I wanted a track that fit a more "main menu" or "introduction" to the sort of world we see in the painting. Not a main theme or anything, but just something more so inspired by Half-Life era menu ambience.
The second track is much more in line with non-structured ambience, There's no set bpm or time signature. It's just a layering of samples and atonal droning that in a game dev sense would work much better for actual level ambience. We're in the painting now, not just viewing it and speculating but we're hearing the sounds of the world, which don't typically end up being fully musical or listenable.