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(Ninja Tune/Inertia)
Over the past two decades the global computer games industry has grown and diversified to the point at which the annual financial turnover of this sector now apparently easily outstrips that of Hollywood’s motion picture industry. As a result, the sizes of design budgets allocated to new games under development have also grown significantly, to the point at which game soundtracks now frequently include the sorts of tunes you’d normally expect to hear on some of the more-forward thinking compilations (witness the likes of RATM and Public Enemy showing up on the recent Vice City sequel). In truth though, we’ve been a long way from the bleepy ‘rent-a-synth’ sonic accompaniments that typified the eighties gaming experience for quite some time now, with the early nineties ushering in the concept of high-profile recording artists turning their attention towards games soundtracks (examples being NIN / Trent Reznor’s score for the first-person PC shooter ‘Quake’ as well as Sasha’s input into ‘Wipeout 3’ for the Playstation).
For the third installment in their popular ‘Splinter Cell’ game series, games designers Ubisoft have decided to take this latter approach even further, enlisting the aid of Ninja Tunes artist Amon Tobin to contribute a ‘layered’ soundtrack to the game that apparently interacts with the player’s movements and actions, bringing elements in and out of the instrumental mix accordingly. This accompanying CD soundtrack collects together the ten different score tracks that Tobin has produced for the game, but obviously due to the limitations of the CD format; you’ll have to look to the game itself if you want to try out the interactive sound feature. At first mention, Amon Tobin’s dark, moody and spectral soundscapes seem particular suited to soundtracking a suspenseful sniper-movie (particularly given the pronounced shift towards lush film-score inspired tracks that’s become evident in his work post-1999’s ‘Supermodified’). For this soundtrack, Tobin apparently concentrated almost totally upon manipulating and processing acoustic instruments, whilst also approaching the music “as if it was the score for a Dario Argento movie”, in order to “create both an occasionally slightly camp homage to the great soundtrack composers and a humble attempt to create the genuine article.”
Opening track ‘The Lighthouse’ emerges out of unfurling Morricone-esque strings into a swaggering bassline that sits somewhere between art-punkers Magazine and Two Lone Swordsmen’s recent Goth-tinged ‘From The Double-Gone Chapel’ album, skittering strings and atonal violin runs sending chills up the spine like some twisted fusion of Morricone’s wide open-sky orchestrations and the deepest and darkest of slasher movies. Halfway through, the eerie background droning vocal washes and diseased-sounding strings build up into a huge poisonous cloud, and the hammering breakbeats begin to accelerate into a seething drum and bass barrage, twisted violins curving their over the sonic wreckage going on beneath. ‘Ruthless’ builds and builds over ringing sleigh bells, cycling electronics and bursts of white noise into a slamming live drums-driven junglist roller that places flecks of funk guitar, Ornette Coleman-esque squealing saxaphone runs and throbbing industrial synths through a hyper-accelerated fury of timestretched and digitally-manipulated drum crashes and snare hits, while ‘Theme From Battery’ offers a quiet counterpoint, with curiously filtered gentle guitar plucks playing over a lush, ebbing backdrop of brooding orchestration and distant, dubbed-out crashes.
‘Kokubo Sosho Stealth’ veers back into grimy jazz-tinged film noir, with shuffling live drums laying down a swaggering groove beneath smoky trumpets and what also sounds like Middle Eastern instrumentation, throbbing dark electronics, distant scraping textures and dubbed-out vocal fragments contributing a darkly spectral atmosphere to proceedings, leading into ‘El Cargo’, which emerges from fluid latin acoustic guitar runs and operatic vocal washes into a lithe breakbeat roller that liberally places fluid-sounding jazzy piano runs over the frenetic rhythms whilst also layering ghostly ethereal female vocals against some relentless crashing drums that push things in the sorts of brooding directions Massive Attack explored on their ‘Mezzanine’ album. ‘Displaced’ wanders its way through plangent guitar runs and Hammond organ drones before accelerating into hyperspeed drum and bass breakbeats, fretless bass licks riding tight alongside the hard metallic snares, whilst also evoking a fusion of Roy Budd’s classic spy themes and Techno Animal’s hard-as-nails dub swagger.
‘Kokubo Sosho Battle’ is actually an adapted version of previously released B-side ‘Cougar Merkin’ (taken from 2002’s ‘Verbal’ 12”) and melds vast washes of martial-sounding crashing drums and echoing trumpet calls with a metallic drum and bass barrage of tribal percussion and Kodo drums that carves a furious path through the sinister orchestration, while ‘Hokkaido’ ventures into brooding strings and washes of percussion, providing a short segue between some of the more formidable explosions going on here, through it still manages to caress the ears in a manner that’s both alluring and disturbing at the same time. Finally, ‘The Clean Up’ brings this soundtrack album to a close, with epic movie-score orchestration swelling ominously behind plodding beats and sinister ringing dub effects in manner suggesting a Dario Argento horror flick, before bursting forth into an orgy of drum and bass breakbeat-fueled violence, crashing snares hammering the way across a soft-focus backdrop of wavering strings, snakelike flutes and stray piano notes.
As a soundtrack commissioned specifically as an accompaniment for a computer game, Amon Tobin’s ‘Chaos Theory’ definitely pushes the boundaries of this still-fledgling genre considerably further, in fact so highly developed and meticulous is Tobin’s approach to the score that this soundtrack album could easily sit on its own as the ‘natural’ after his recent soundtrack-tinged ‘Out From Out Where’, and indeed your enjoyment of ‘Chaos Theory’ is unlikely to be undimmed if like me you haven’t exactly exercised your gaming thumbs for a while. What’s particularly compelling about this soundtrack is the way in which Tobin has drawn upon a rich pallette of sonic textures sourced almost completely from ‘real’ instruments (horns, strings, percussion, guitar, bass, flutes) and then pushed them through his trademark twisted electronics to create an enveloping experience that’s disturbing, darkly beautiful and assaultive at the same – it would be nice if as many artists were so meticulous with their own artist albums as Tobin has been with this game soundtrack commission. If you’re an Amon Tobin fan (and there seem to be a fair few about these post-’Supermodified’ days), you’re in for a treat. Highly recommended.
Check out http://www.amontobin.com and http://www.ninjatune.net.
