Perennial NOW favourites Yamantaka//Sonic Titan and musical collective Pantayo are behind the music heard in forthcoming video game Severed, in which a one-armed warrior, Sasha, battles monsters and other scary things while searching for her family. It’s out April 26 for Playstation Vita, and the soundtrack alone took two years to complete.
Yamantaka drummer/producer/visionary Alaska B, who also scored the soundtrack for the documentary Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John, which premieres at Hot Docs on April 29, 30 and May 7, broke down the process for us.
“Graham Smith from DrinkBox Studios approached Yamantaka//Sonic Titan back in 2014 saying that they had a lot of fans of our music in their office. We started talking about working together on a soundtrack to their upcoming game, Severed, starring a heroine of colour and great art by Augusto Quijano.
“I was already a fan of their previous game, Guacamelee, so we suggested that a collaboration with the all-woman kulintang group Pantayo would be really awesome, since YT//ST had briefly collaborated with them on a still-unfinished cantata earlier in the year. After throwing around some ideas as to how that collaboration could sound, we approached Pantayo and they were excited.
“The soundtrack took two years, with 17 musicians performing on it, so it was definitely different than working on an album with five or six people. The aims of the tracks are for looping and sitting as the background to dungeon crawling, so our approach to songwriting had to adjust. Our production settings, gear and performers changed constantly from the beginning to the end [of the project] because of the long process of sculpting sounds that work well as loops and constant background music, and also change along with the development schedule of the game itself.
“Sometimes you aren’t sure exactly what a song will be used for, or what it will even look like while it’s playing, and with all that time for things to change, we all changed drastically as musicians over the course of its two-year production process.
“The team was fantastic – not only our musicians, but the DrinkBox team really made a fantastic game I can stand behind. I’m really thankful about getting to work with Shub Roy (ex-Dirty Beaches, YT//ST) and Walter Scott (ex-Dead Wife, YT//ST), who played with us for the first time since 2011’s YT//ST. And we collaborated with Jenny Mecija and Anissa Hart, formerly of Ohbijou, Andrew McAnsh and PJ Andersson (Hundred Faces Group).
“I try to look at this constant flux as an asset now. There are many different ideas and voices represented in the tracks. In a way, the experience paralleled that of the game’s heroine. Like, ‘Will you even be the same artist when you are done a journey this long?’”
carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis
