Genesis Noir Soundtrack

Genesis Noir Soundtrack, Skillbard, 2021

Few games released in 2021 were as deliciously high-concept as Genesis Noir. Its gameplay, inspired by point-and-click adventures, was relatively sparse and straightforward. What truly set Genesis Noir apart were its singular visual style and narrative ambitions. True to its title, the game fused a film noir story with meditations on man, time and the universe. More specifically, it used the Big Bang as a metaphor for an archetypal crime plot, in which a jealous rival attempts to murder the protagonist’s former lover. It falls to No Man – a watchmaker representing time itself – to alter the course of history just as the universe is about to come into being. In development since 2014, Genesis Noir was well received by critics upon release, although several reviewers noted that it often resembled an animated film with only limited player interaction.

What role, then, does music play in persuading players to accept Genesis Noir’s unusual setting on its own terms? It is worth noting that the crime victim at the centre of the story, Miss Mass, is a nightclub singer, and that several of the game’s puzzles and mini-games revolve around music. In other words, developer Feral Cat Den assigned music a more prominent narrative and structural role than most games do. To write the Genesis Noir soundtrack, the team turned to Tom Carrell and Vincent Oliver, who work under the name Skillbard. Although still a relatively new act, Skillbard had already accumulated credits across film, television, music videos, TV spots, sound art and games.

For the Genesis Noir soundtrack, Skillbard assembled a surprisingly large ensemble for an indie title. The performers included a jazz quintet, a small female choir, a shakuhachi soloist, a 30-piece string orchestra and several vocalists. Genesis Noir’s creative lead Evan Anthony summed up the desired musical approach by saying: “The story is similar to the godly dramas of Greek and Norse Legends, except that this particular god has a trenchcoat, fedora, and an affinity for trad jazz.” Thanks in no small part to the game’s foregrounding of music as both gameplay mechanism and narrative centrepiece, Skillbard’s work did not go unnoticed. Among the many positive notices the score received was praise from the Washington Post, which described Genesis Noir’s “beautiful jazz score” as “entrancing”.

That praise was entirely deserved, although calling the Genesis Noir soundtrack simply a jazz score does not quite capture how inventive it is. Like the game’s striking visuals, the music has to do substantial conceptual work in order to bridge the gap between urban noir iconography and cosmic space. As it turns out, those two realms are not so far apart after all – or at least Skillbard make them seem emotionally contiguous by finding the shared mood beneath their apparently incompatible surfaces.

Classical film noir scoring often centres on the conflict between an individual and a hostile world. Loneliness and alienation run through many noir scores of the 1940s and 1950s. Those same sensations are entirely appropriate for a story about a solitary man trying to halt the birth of the universe and save the life of a woman who has already left him. What Skillbard do on the Genesis Noir soundtrack is to take the melancholic saxophone solos familiar from classic noir, place them in an immense acoustic so that their languid lines seem to drift across the depths of space, surround them with mysterious electronics and thereby make the union of two unlikely sound worlds feel wholly natural.

Thanks to the composers’ elegant, unshowy approach, Genesis Noir supports the game’s yearning, introspective narrative with remarkable assurance. Using individual characters as stand-ins for concepts such as time and mass is a risky conceit. Yet the soundtrack remains intimate and emotionally potent while still operating on a scale large enough to suit Anthony’s comparison with ancient godly drama. Yes, the prevailing mood is dreamlike and at times surreal, but it never becomes emotionally detached or cold. Even the score’s stranger synth timbres play an important role, preserving just enough lightness as the music contemplates questions of cosmic significance.

Skillbard unveil their distinctive take on noir jazz immediately with opening track “Miss Mass Theme”. Surrounded by spacious synths, tenor saxophone and trumpet solos drift through the ether beneath the wordless vocals of Kitty Whitelaw, whose delivery feels operatic rather than sultry. This blend of familiar and unfamiliar elements gives the music an uncanny edge, heightened by the way those warm brass melodies hover on the brink of slipping into dissonant free-jazz harmonies. Other tracks in the soundtrack’s first half sustain this intriguing atmosphere. “Mélodie Fatale (Live at the Constant Club)” gives Whitelaw further opportunities to display her range, from airy sweetness to deep-throated darkness. “Shadow Trail”’s chiming synths and saxophone solo inevitably recall Vangelis’ Blade Runner, while “Tick Tock” ominously swings between catchy brass hooks and dissonant, squelching solos.

Before long, however, the composers begin moving away from the melodically rich jazz inflections that provide the score’s most obvious emotional anchor, though without abandoning them entirely. “The Hunt” surprises with dry layers of quirky acoustic percussion that recall mid-1980s Tom Waits. “Wave Tuner” interrupts its especially languorous brass writing with sound effects and random snippets of radio presenters speaking, yet manages to do so without disrupting the music’s drifting motion; on the contrary, those intrusions give it sharper contours. “Golden Boy Suite”, driven by a pounding electronic pulse with a strangely elastic timbre, unfolds into a cue that is equally lushly melodic and full of screaming dissonance, neatly encapsulating the soundtrack’s ability to be romantic and abrasive at once. Meanwhile, the plodding rhythms of “Pastoral pt 2 Grounded” seem to drag the cue forwards almost against its will, while eerie gong-like strikes intensify the sense of foreboding and inevitability.

Although the Genesis Noir soundtrack rarely escapes its slow tempos, Skillbard still shape a clear narrative arc and establish tangible dramatic stakes. “Alone” distils the heartbreak at the centre of the story into a melody for bass soloist that is both passionate and resigned, set against swooning strings with just enough glassiness to suit the score’s otherworldly acoustic world. From there, the music moves further and further away from its noir-jazz beginnings without once losing its footing. “Itsuki No Komoriuta” and “Shiruetto To Kate”, with their spare shakuhachi lines, jagged outlines and aura of ancient ritual, perfectly match the score’s cosmic dimension. “Pioneer Convoy” then stretches the soundtrack’s languorous tendencies into its most strung-out, psychedelic form.

Electronics take over on “You Look At Me” and “Tetrachromacy”. The former is the score’s most esoteric cue, a piece of near-ambient electronica whose irregular pulses still carry genuine sadness. “Tetrachromacy” swings to the opposite extreme, built around massive electronic beats and a towering, glistening three-note progression surrounded by almost random synth noise. The pent-up tension is finally released on “We”, the soundtrack’s first overt expression of hope, as a female choir sings a simple, uplifting melody that even withstands the disorienting synths gathering around it. Finally, “Siren Birth” brings the journey to a momentous close in space-rock form – imagine Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the heavens fill not with darkness but with starlight, the music soaring higher and higher towards some unknown destination. Yes, the Genesis Noir soundtrack is jazz – but jazz brilliantly bent into boldly adventurous shapes.