The Saros soundtrack blends dark synthesis, drone metal, manipulated voices, and walls of guitars so distorted they seem to summon the Eclipse itself. For composer, producer, and artist Sam Slater, creating the score meant more than writing music to accompany the action. It meant finding the soul of a planet.
With the soundtrack launching today, May 22, we spoke to Sam about building Carcosa’s musical identity, writing for Arjun’s search for Nitya, and making music that sounds like the sky being torn apart.
PlayStation Blog: You described the Saros soundtrack as a “wonderful, massive, dark puzzle”. When you first stepped into Carcosa creatively, what was the puzzle you felt you had to solve?
Sam Slater: As with all projects, especially one as massive as a video game, the initial puzzle is: what is the soul of this score going to be?
Greg Louden (Housemarque’s Creative Director), Joe Thwaites (Music Lead at PlayStation Studios Creative Arts), and I went in circles looking for the initial thematic or textural ideas that would allow us to grab hold of Carcosa and identify it as a place.
As a composer, I tend to start from the idea of building a world. I want to know what that world is. At the stage where a composer joins a game, you have very early test imagery, but you do not have the completed video game in front of you, so everyone is trying to work out whether each idea is part of that world or not.
That puzzle slowly stacks on top of itself until it becomes this incredible, time-bending, 3D puzzle made of music that also has to function and allow a player to get through the game.
What was the initial creative conversation between you, Gregory Louden, and the Housemarque team?
Greg’s a metalhead. I’m a metalhead. We share a lot of similar experiences and have probably stood in very similar crowds over the last 20 years of our lives.
He had this idea of drone metal and dark electronic music, and the tension between those two worlds. One is very organic and overdriven. One is incredibly clean, but it is the high fidelity of those electronics that becomes overwhelming. Then you have to somehow bring those two together.
We spent a long time trading tracks. There was a playlist where Greg and I were pinging music back and forth, and it went really wide. It was about aligning on a shared language for something incredibly abstract: the musical soul of a world that does not exist.
The sound design is such a big part of how Saros feels. How did you think about the relationship between score and sound design?
That is where the joy comes in. I do not see any distinction. There are people who care about the sound of a gun or a room dripping, and invest as much of themselves in those choices as I do in the score.
One of the beautiful things about games is that we are talking about one audio engine, one system managing the information coming to our ears as a player. I do not see music as distinct from sound design.
The sound design team and music teams were in constant dialogue. Should I leave space for you? Can you leave space for me? There was one discussion about a level where there is rain and atmospheric sound. It was positioned in the game where you might imagine you would want music to set something up. I wanted to step back, because atmospheric sound could do all the things music can do.
The score has been described as growing out of the game world itself. How did the different biomes shape the music?
The compositional frame behind the level design was quite functional. We would take core visual markers of the landscape and seek to mirror them in the score.
Take Ancient Depths, for example. The main melodic idea is a ceramic, almost stone-like sound that has been knocked together into a giant cave and then re-pitched. The idea is that the reverb itself is always bending downwards. So the music is floating in the foreground, but every time something echoes into the distance, it tumbles downwards. You get this feeling of constant descent.
Then, when the Eclipse is activated, there is an almost metallic percussion sound. Depending on how near or far you are from the machines, it will grab hold of the same rhythmic ideas that are in the sound design. So the music and sound design lock together depending on your proximity to the machinery.
Throughout the game, a lot of sounds are made using human voices that have been manipulated. The idea was taking something human and transforming it into something completely unrecognisable.
In Desecrated Fortress, we recorded the experimental vocalist Rully Shabara. We set up this huge dangling metal sheet, almost like tin foil, with a driver at the top and a microphone at the bottom, and created feedback so that every time he yelled into it, it stimulated this unstable piece of metal.
It is indicative of the experimentation that happened throughout the score: taking human sound and pushing it into something unstable. I really wanted the only voice, the only shred of humanity left, to be Arjun’s ideas about Nitya.
“Sun is Forever”, the lead track, began as a theme for Nitya. How did you approach writing music for someone who is absent, but emotionally central to the story?
I do not believe she is absent. I think she is central, she is just distant.
I did not want to think of it as a siren song. She is not meant to be luring Arjun; there is almost a motherly quality to it. I wanted the piece of music to have mystery, but not in an overt way. It should feel almost as though the voice is saying: when you meet me here, everything is going to be all right.
That is why the entrance of the guitars either ruins that idea or defines it. I find it a very cathartic moment when those guitars come in. They push the voice out of the way, and the guitars are completely synonymous with the Eclipse in the game. So it is almost like the Eclipse pushing Nitya out of the way.
The track has this contrast between love and longing on one side, and corruption and anger on the other. Was that contrast the heart of the whole score?
I love contrast in music generally, and I think those contradictions are what make the story and the world compelling. Saros is a love story in many ways. Arjun is only a compelling hero because he is, in essence, corrupted.
The humanity comes from the contradiction. That is throughout the whole score. The Eclipse is about degradation, overdrive, and things being pushed beyond their limits. Everything on the so-called “normal side” of Carcosa is looking at a kind of high definition that can then be destroyed by the Eclipse itself.
How do you make music sound like it is being consumed and corrupted by the Eclipse?
Housemarque kept saying the Eclipse had to feel like the world was pouring over. Overdrive [an audio effect that creates a warm, gritty, distortion] is a great sonic metaphor for that, because it is literally a waveform pouring over the limits of whatever circuit it is in.
But the thing that defines the Eclipse most characteristically, in my opinion, is that every melody you hear in the non-Eclipse world is shifted exactly halfway through the scale.
The world stays where it is and gets overdriven, but every single melody moves six semitones up or down the scale. Your brain still hears the root of the world, the low drones telling you where home is, but home has been destroyed. Suddenly, this melody you have been listening to for 20 or 30 minutes is completely in the wrong place.
I do not want the player thinking, “Oh, that melody has been transposed.” But if I have done my job well, the feeling is brought into the player, and the world suddenly feels wrong.
Saros has some incredible boss encounters. How do you approach writing boss music that feels memorable and intense, but still supports the player?
It is so hard, and yet so enjoyable.
The music needs to communicate energy very simply. When you are making it, you feel quite intuitively whether it is working or not, because you do not want it to end. If you are getting it right, you start flowing with the idea.
I have noticed some player comments about a sense of flow, which is great, because when I was making those tracks I had that same feeling. If you get it right, they just roll.
Every boss fight features the themes and sonic identity of its level, both the non-Eclipse version and the Eclipse version. The boss is absolutely the culmination of the thematic ideas of the level itself. At the same time, the musical language needs to shift in a way that gives you energy and pushes you through. If you are anything like me, you might be meeting that boss 20 times before you say goodbye and move on to the next one.
What do you hope players feel when they finally step out of Carcosa and carry the soundtrack with them?
When you watch a really good film, the credits roll and there is that little moment where you remember you are in a cinema, because the world that has been built is so coherent. That happens because every single person who made that film has done their job well.
Games take a little longer to get through than a single sitting, but ideally, when the credits roll, players have that little jolt and remember they are not on Carcosa.
We want to make this world as coherent and compelling as possible. I hope people enjoy that magic trick: a good story, good game, good music, good sound design, good acting, all of it working. Then they enjoy the reveal when they pop back into their sofas and think, “Whoa. Cool.”
That is what I am crossing my fingers for.
To hear the full interview with Sam Slater, check out the Official PlayStation Podcast later today. The Saros Original Soundtrack is available to stream on all platforms now.
