Enemy Zero Soundtrack

Enemy Zero Soundtrack, Michael Nyman, 1996

Few video game auteurs have left behind an oeuvre as intriguing – and divisive – as Kenji Eno. Fittingly, Eno came to prominence during one of experimental game design’s great heydays: the mid-1990s. His company Warp became best known in the West for its D series of horror games: D, Enemy Zero, and D2. Only very loosely connected with one another, these titles proposed strikingly unconventional gameplay and narrative ideas, admittedly with varying degrees of success. Even so, they secured Eno’s place in game history through sheer audacity.

It is certainly not Enemy Zero’s storyline that makes it most innovative. The game’s narrative – a spaceship overrun by murderous xenomorphs – borrows large portions from Alien and mixes in elements from other science-fiction classics such as Blade Runner. More interesting is the game’s central mechanic. The rampaging aliens are invisible, and the only way to locate and shoot them is by relying on a sonar-like system that indicates their presence through changes in pitch and frequency. It was an ingenious idea, even if some reviewers felt it had not been implemented as smoothly as it should have been, resulting in a brutally difficult game.

Usually, Eno composed the music for his games himself. On Enemy Zero, however, he outsourced scoring duties to a composer who seemed a distinctly unlikely choice for a survival horror soundtrack: Michael Nyman. A renowned minimalist composer for both concert hall and cinema, Nyman had risen to wider prominence through his collaborations with director Peter Greenaway. Bringing him on board was arguably quite a coup for Eno. This was only a few years after Nyman’s score for The Piano had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the composer was at the height of his name recognition.

What Nyman ultimately delivered is both groundbreaking and deeply familiar. One might assume that working in a genre he had never remotely touched before – sci-fi horror – would encourage him to explore new facets of his trademark minimalist style. That is not really the case on the Enemy Zero soundtrack. The work remains very much in line with Nyman’s previous film scores: intricately layered, classically inflected motifs, ostinati, and drones arranged in unusual timbral combinations, often driven by breathlessly motoric rhythms. Then again, Eno hired Nyman precisely because he admired that earlier work, so the score’s continuity with it should come as no surprise.

Within game music, on the other hand, Nyman’s score remains unique and is one of the very few examples of this particular kind of orchestral writing. The music itself is not especially unusual in broader terms, but within the context of scoring a sci-fi horror game, it is highly distinctive. The obvious question, then, is how Nyman’s cerebral, if still accessible, idiom functions within survival horror, a genre usually dominated by much harsher and more aggressively dissonant sounds.

As it turns out, Nyman’s score – one of his most melodic soundtracks – suits both the game and the genre rather well, though it shifts attention away from some of the elements survival horror scores typically foreground. Just consider the various themes that run through the Enemy Zero soundtrack. It is worth noting that this score is significantly more thematic than Nyman’s previous film work. Of the three principal themes, the love theme receives the greatest emphasis. That is not the sort of narrative element horror games usually bring to the fore, but there is a love story running through Enemy Zero, and Nyman chooses to stress that emotional thread rather than the alien terror itself.

Presented initially, like all three themes, in a piano-only version that feels slightly too lightweight to hold the attention on its own, the love theme first appears in “Aspects of Love”. That cue is a thickly flowing string adagio, full of heaving emotion and with an appropriately foreboding cast. A strained, nearly tortured version of the same theme then opens “Agony” on accented string chords. The cue recalls the melody at a moment of crisis and attack, carried by a wordless solo soprano struggling against alternately jabbing and dissonantly drifting musical forces. Suitably, “The Last Movement” resolves the drama by structuring itself around exultant statements of the love theme.

The fact that the soundtrack’s second prominent idea belongs to its protagonist, Laura, further underlines how much more character-centred Nyman’s work is than most horror scoring. Laura’s theme is probably the score’s most immediately recognisable melody, functioning as its calm and reassuring centre. First heard in solo piano form on “Laura’s Theme”, it appears more compellingly on “Lamentation”. There, as in “Agony”, the solo soprano heightens the melody’s emotional force through overtly operatic expression. “Laura’s Dream”, meanwhile, brings out the theme’s innate optimism and hope through tender writing for strings and piano.

It is precisely this emotional involvement that allows the soundtrack’s more genre-typical passages to hit with real force. Once we care about the characters, we also care about the danger they are in. A chromatically descending theme signals dread in “Digital Tragedy”, “Digital Complex”, and “Malfunction”. Ironically, given how much Enemy Zero avoids conventional horror scoring, “Digital Tragedy” and “Digital Complex” come closest to sounding a little too beholden to genre clichés. “Malfunction” is much stronger, presenting the same material in fuller orchestration and finding exactly the right balance between animated nervousness and slowly encroaching unease.

Finally, the Michael Nyman Band unleashes all that accumulated tension across a quartet of pieces: “Confusion”, “Enemy Zero”, “Invisible Enemy”, and “Battle”. These frantically driven cues are a masterclass in energetic ostinato writing that never succumbs to monotony despite its obvious repetition, helped by melodies that are unusually dramatic and declamatory by Nyman’s standards. They are as densely and carefully layered as anything he wrote for film. It is obvious that he treated the Enemy Zero soundtrack with no less care than work in media more familiar to him. These invigorating battle cues complete one of game music’s most satisfying acts of genre subversion.