occasionally i get an email from the minecraft folks asking if i'd like to write more music, and this time around i wasn't swamped by working on the score to a visual novel (harmony: the fall of reverie, out now for almost a year) so i said yes sure!
anyway this is the result of that!
i'm embedding the youtube playlist because it probably plays the best with cohost?? just watch out for ads i guess. here's a link thing to all the places the music can be streamed: https://ingrv.es/minecraft-1-21-sound-sfo-y - hopefully qobuz pops soon, because you can actually buy files there to download.
i had a really good time writing these 3 bgm tracks & 1 disc. there's going to be a fancy interview on minecraft dot com soon, so you can read my very professional-sounding perspective there, but here's some thoughts for this web site:
deeper
i hated this one for a while. i literally worked for 2 days on a version of the track that didn't go anywhere... so i scrapped it & started something completely different. then i disliked that one for a bit until i figured out where it was going...and then it became my favorite piece i've written for a minute. i really love getting a chance to write something a bit darker. when i sent it in, they were like oh wow this goes places. and wanted to reiterate that it was fine to have something like this in the game, because the atmosphere of minecraft is a bit like a balance between light & dark. and there's a lot of light in the game. so here's the dark.
eld unknown
this was the first track i wrote for the update. the initial prompt for the update was doing some nostalgic-feeling music, so i played around with some fun fm synthesis sounds alongside my usual piano and just kept developing it into this big progression that keeps changing into new forms. it sort of just all came together instinctively. happy with it!
endless
another thought prompted by the minecraft folks was that i should try reusing some older melodies in the attempts to achieve nostalgia. one of my most popular tracks from caves & cliffs is infinite amethyst, and i also really like the lietmotif used throughout the track. so i began this piece as a bit of a piano improvisation on a theme... i took the melodic material from infinite amethyst and kept riffing on it in different ways.... by the time i was done, i started doing some weird pitch-shifting stuff, some subtle synth pad drones to reinforce the piano frequencies, and it had become almost 7 minutes long. oops!!
creator
my 'disc' for this update. it's my third 'single' released entirely within minecraft, and every single time i try to do something new, and always with the perspective that this might be a piece of music listened to by someone within the world of minecraft..... pigstep was my attempt at writing something piglins would jam to. otherside was a song from a personal place that fit the mountainous introspection. so creator is specifically written as a song digging into the mystery of the trial chambers arriving in 1.21. i adore writing silly little waltzes, so this was my chance to write a weirdo theme.
enjoy!!!!
