Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: Bandcamp (spread across nine albums)

Info

Here’s the funny game about solving puzzles with your friends in the outdoors, or if you played it like I played it, standing around and laughing at your friends as they make increasingly convoluted and unnecessary attempts to solve puzzles. The music was handled by Australian duo aksfx (Sam Gill and Luke Neher) working on their second game ever; both happen to be friends with the game’s dev staff.

The game’s soundtrack is somewhat annoyingly split across eight albums and then one single for the trailer theme. Seven of those eight albums are “radio” albums that contain almost all of the music you’ll hear in-game; spread around the map are radio stations that constantly play a fifteen-minute loop of music (exactly the length of the day-night cycle) in their general vicinity, and after you activate them you can listen to them anywhere with a portable radio. The final album of “B-sides” has the game’s menu/UI music and one track comprising all of the pieces that play through the one part of the game that has dedicated background music (“Silent Gauntlet”).

The soundtrack is most frequently minimalist music with lots of short, stacked riffs, often crossed with ambient music, downtempo EDM, or more clubby EDM. The characteristic instruments are staccato vowel “oh”/“ah”/etc. vocal samples and mallet percussion, with some occasional piano and drumkit/other percussion rounding out the acoustic instrumentation; there are also plenty of synths of various sorts, obviously in the EDM tracks but also all over the more acoustic-leaning ones too. The sound’s pretty warm, wide, and spacious, with lots of sustains and reverb on things. Overall it feels pretty appropriate to evoke the collaborativeness with the minimalist compositions and the outdoorsiness with the open sound.

Enjoyable soundtrack! I’ll always appreciate minimalism in VGM when it’s embraced more than just one or two pieces in a soundtrack, though the way it’s expressed in this soundtrack tends to be on the more basic side and I wouldn’t have minded a bit more intricacy for sickos (I’m sickos). There are some occasional tracks that do mess around a bit more with rhythmic contrasts and are therefore neat, particularly in the Breathwork and Mallets stations, and in a few other tracks I like how the electronic production is integrated with the minimalism.

Recommended tracks:

• “Big Walk Theme (Jumping Voices)” was my favorite version of this main a cappella theme that appears a few times because I like the way it feels with the jagged drums at 2:01

• “[10:15pm] Vox Humana” has some of the more active minimalist partwriting in the game

• “[5:41pm] Dusk” is from the strongly ambient radio station; the last three and a half minutes are just one synth being phasered around a bunch and I appreciate that

• “[8:58pm] Electr” is from the club music station and this one has the nastiest groove of the bunch

• “[10:09am] Phase ii” is from the blatantly Steve Reich station; it picks up a little odd time polymeter around 4:05 with the plucky synth

• “[11:42am] Midi” is from the downtempo station and gets a little stuttery sometimes