Malevolent Lands And Benevolent Creatures (2018)

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My second video game soundtrack to not feature an accompanying game; Malevolent Lands and Benevolent Creatures paints a picture of a world inhabited by interesting creatures, in harsh and troubled environments. Each area features a track for the land itself, describing the bad characteristics such as Land of Chaos, Land of Dread and Land of Evil. These are followed by a temple, based on what is needed to cure that land of its problems; Temple of Tranquility, Temple of Hope, and Temple of Holiness accordingly. Finally, once the bad forces have been dealt with, a boss will emerge and a battle is fought to finally free the land from its curse.

Compared to Journey’s End, this album’s video game would be more of a free roaming, puzzling and interacting style game where problems would be solved by talking to the inhabitants of the lands and helping them out, in order to free the lands of their issues. With this in mind, I took influence from indie video games such as Yume Nikki and off, as well as more well known games such as Ghost Trick and Earthbound.

The album artwork is by Jonathan Wentworth, an original piece based on the sound and concept of the album. It features the main character of the game, running away from a pair of hands, with eyes watching down the corridor. In addition to postcard artwork for my album ‘Wavelengths’, and the cover of ‘Classical Works Volume 1’ this was part of many art collaborations between us.