Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: Bandcamp, iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
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Big new release by cool game company Cyan. Though this one has been getting some pretty mixed reviews, I hear? I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t actually been reading them. Maybe I’ll play it some year, though my computer struggled a bit to get through Obduction, so maybe some year will be some years away.
This time the soundtrack was done by Maclaine Diemer, whom I haven’t heard anything by before so I can’t tell you anything about him, besides background material like apparently he wrote a bunch of songs for various Guild Wars 2 expansions. The music is a bit similar to Obduction, in that it’s synthy ambience, though there’s less piano & percussion and more guitar & grime. Diemer talked about the musical concept on a podcast with Emily Reese:
There’s this notion of messages and decaying sort of signals that you get from the ether that you’re around or the environment that you’re around, and that’s how you start to piece together the story. And it ties into something I’ve been obsessed with—and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to explore this idea for real—of what does music sound like if let’s say you’re planet Earth, you send out a signal, and ten million light years away you receive that signal: there’s no way it’s going to get to you perfectly, so what does that sound like and how do you interpret that?
So the soundtrack is constructed with a bunch of heavily manipulated sounds, many of which were taken from the keyboard that Robyn Miller used to compose the original Myst soundtrack, warped and distorted and noisy to evoke the feeling that you’re not actually listening to the real music, but rather a degraded transmission of it. It’s very cool sonically! Put on some good headphones for this one, if you have ’em.
Recommended tracks:
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“Juleston” starts off with a machiney beep boop sound before turning into a lonely keyboard track that sounds utterly decayed with audio artifacts
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“Sulfuric Pools” has some nice dissonant pitched percussion clusters happening in the background
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“Batteries Casting Shadows” is one of the noisiest pieces on the soundtrack, full of sawblades
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“The Reservoir” is just a couple of nice warm pads washing over you, occasionally moving unpredictably
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