Game info: Wikipedia
Listening/music info: soundtrack album volume 1, volume 2
Info
I just found out that the Son Lux guy did the soundtrack to the new Marathon game??? No idea how this escaped my attention until now wow
So anyway, Ryan Lott is the leader and vocalist of the electronic post rock band Son Lux, and sometimes he scores stuff too, with or without the band. The one soundtrack of his I’m familiar with is the one for the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (which was with the band), which mixes orchestra with loud electronic noises and chopped & processed vocals. Marathon’s soundtrack is pretty similar to that, except going all-in on the loud noises and vocals.
Stylistically you could call this industrial ambient, generally on the more intense side of things through a mix of dark, evil sound design and tribal percussion. Sometimes it’s texturally reminiscent of Ed Harrison’s soundtrack for the Half-Life 2 mod NeoToyko, though with way way less of the post rock flavor that that soundtrack has. The treatment of the vocals reminded me a bit of Humanity, though here it feels a little more syllabic than the more wordless vox there.
But the star of the show here is the loud electronic noises, far and away. From start to finish this soundtrack is a feast of wack-ass sound design. We’ve got loud drums, corroded drums, loud corroded drums, glitching, warping, glitched warping, distorted voices, distorted synths, distorted distortions, just a lot of damn cool sounds that you’ve probably never heard before in your life no matter which track you hit play on. Most of the tracks don’t do a whole lot beyond establishing atmosphere through their sound design, not like the constant rhythmic complexity in PRAGMATA for example, but when you sound this good, you don’t really need to do anything else.
The soundtrack was released in two volumes, the second of which has pieces which are much longer than the first (7-10 minutes versus 1-2 usually). Several of these longer pieces include segments or the entireties of some of the shorter pieces from the first volume as suite kinds of things, though I wasn’t paying close enough attention to identify if all of them were composed entirely from other pieces in the soundtrack or if some/all of them include some unique material too. I don’t know enough about the game to know why these exist, whether they’re special remixes or arranged to show dynamic in-game usage or something else entirely.
Recommended tracks:
All selections by Ryan Lott, except where noted.
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“For Those Who Did Not Wake” actually does have a little bit of polymeter at the start, that first tuned percussion riff is 3 bars of 4/4 (12 beats) while the rest of the track is phrased in 4 bars of 4/4 (16 beats)
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“We’re All Monsters” is one of the most “lyrical” pieces in the soundtrack, a bit dramatic too
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“Code Race (Brendan Angelides Remix)” (arr. Brendan Angelides) is as close as this soundtrack gets to straightforward EDM
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“Only Letters and Numbers” is a bit less threatening and more purely ambient
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“Tissue Unwinds” incorporates at least three different solo pieces that I would’ve considered posting on their own (“We Stole a Moon,” “It Wasn’t a Dream,” and “Discontent”), so it’s incredibly efficient that I can just post them all at once like this
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“Assert” was the most evocative of these suite pieces to me (though I didn’t immediately recognize any pieces of it from earlier), feels like the world collapsing
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