While reviewing the hours of in-game music we made for Genesis Noir, we found some pieces fully formed and suitable for standalone listening. Others, due to the interactive nature of the games score, were 'bitty' and layered..
Seeking a cohesive album album, not just a playlist of bits grabbed from the game, we spent two months significantly overhauling and extending cues, adding solos, new sections, and even writing lyrics.
The album's 26th track, The Seventh Day, is based around music that is heard when our protagonist takes a nap in the last of seven mini-puzzles that parallel the seven days of creation in the book of Genesis.
For its lyric, we echoed the music’s aleatoric nature with an equally aleatoric literary technique: The Découpé or Cut-Up technique popularised by William S. Burroughs in the ‘60s.
Cut-up is performed by taking a finished text and cutting it into pieces to be randomly rearranged into a new text.
Lending a nebulous & otherworldly intrigue, we amalgamated a NASA text, explaining the timeline of the Big Bang, with passages from the Christian Bible’s Genesis, accounting God’s creation of the universe.
Another proponent of cut up was David Bowie. He even had his own software made to jumble texts without fear of paper cuts. Bowie’s Verbasiser Isn’t available to download so we used this fantastic emulation.
The output was quite striking; Sometimes prosaic, often pure nonsense but occasionally absolute magic:
The Lyric
After lots of pruning, editing and reordering, we had our lyric:
A Birth ago: The beginning…
There dawns the soupy God
And formed there, the darkness dinosaurs: A billion formless monsters
The instant atoms of God, God of the protons. The filamentary and elementary
His particle lasted infinite solar winds
Creating day in black photons, the wild sky. God was day
As the light permeated: A billion lights in an instant
Photons rule galaxies, galactic hydrogen empties the skies, their gravitation governed
Forming themselves, the stars saw a greater universe and spun their primordial web
A system under seed, a surface according to God… God unto this
So speaketh the large-scale dwarf that had fahrenheit enough
He planted planets, for our era was a billion to be
God was the center around every earth was formed
So whole, the seas known light. Ground-water broke and a million familiar seas
Trees blessed the waters, the waters runneth cool ‘cross that tiny, simple ground
Supermassive years, living mammals merge and ‘come space kind
Then mankind… And the according image… was God
Wonder over science…
Time was a God. And in God appear the heavens & the earth
From morning, a birth: The first universe in seconds was evening
And now, the seventh day… Rest
The Voice
Seeking a voice that evoked the grandeur of old Hollywood biblical epics, we turned to the booming tones of voice actor Earnie Jay.
Ernie Jay
The calm of the piece was lovely in the game but, for the album, we created structure by incorporating extra percussion. We also repurposed some unused sax takes for melodic development, and went wild on some old synths for a Sun Ra-esque freakout climax.
The Result
More Making Of
Read more about our processes creating the music and sound of Genesis Noir
