Jason Graves on Shaping Metallic Horror for Still Wakes The Deep’s Soundtrack
"I'm pressing the keyboard and getting goose bumps, going: 'Oh my gosh. This sounds like it could be one of the creatures from the game!'"
Posted 3 months ago
It wasn’t Dead Space that got Jason Graves the job of scoring the narrative, first-person horror of Still Wakes the Deep. Nor was it his harrowing soundtracks to Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology. Instead, it was a fairy-tale game about a little mouse on an adventure. Moss: Book 2 is about as removed from blood-curdling, supernatural terror as can be, but in sourcing music for its upcoming horror game, developer The Chinese Room was looking for one thing: range.
Still Wakes The Deep takes place on a damaged oil rig in the North Sea.
©The Chinese Room
“The music [of Moss: Book 2] uses a lot of small instruments,” says Graves. “It's very pastoral, quaint, and sort of dainty – as far away from horror as you could get. And that was the combination that caused Daan [Hendriks, audio director at The Chinese Room] to reach out to me and say: 'Hey, we're working on a new game. What's your schedule like? Would you be interested in talking about it?' I just saw that it was someone from ‘@Chinese Room.co.uk’ and I was just like: ‘Yes, absolutely. Let's talk soon. I'm in.’ I didn't care what it was because I love their games. They're amazing.”
As it turned out, the project would shamble perfectly into place in Grave’s monster-ridden discography. The collapsing North Sea oil rig upon which Still Wakes the Deep takes place is a terrifying metallic beast, and that’s before an ethereal entity begins to corrupt those desperately striving to survive its downfall.
To cultivate a representative and nerve-shredding soundscape, Graves sought the aid once more of sculptor Matt McConnell. A decade prior, McConnell had devised The Instrument. A grand, multi-faceted creation of glass, metal, strings, and bells, it helped Graves define the soundtrack to 2013’s Tomb Raider. The steel foundations and tighter, often claustrophobic scope of Still Wakes the Deep, however, demanded something far smaller in scale, though no less versatile. Thus, The Rig was born.
“[McConnell] was amazing,” Graves says. “He built the thing in three weeks, and I went to go see it and he had made it look like an oil rig, because of course he did! Even the helicopter landing pad, it sticks out so I can bow the edge and it makes this crazy sound. So really, everything was on hold until I got that because we didn't know how it was gonna sound. But that was half the score done! I just needed to figure out how to record it and how to incorporate it as ‘music’ and sort of blend those lines between sound design and music cues.”
The Rig, in all its metallic glory.
©Jason Graves
Graves was able to rap, twang, and bow every element of the metallic construction. And with the aid of some talented sound programmers and impressive microphones, he stretched those recordings into effects ideally pitched to agonize our ears. Sounds fit for both the immensity of a collapsing oil rig and the warped monsters inhabiting it.
“When you’re bowing something, you're limited to the length of the bow to get a really long single sound before your bow and the sound stops and starts over again,” Graves explains. “It sounds very unnatural. So I could have maybe three seconds of a sustained sound. The beauty of those microphones is that when you put it down, it also makes it longer. So I get it twice as low and four times as long. So instead of three seconds, now it's 12 or 15 seconds long, and it also sounds like some giant monster growling. It's all these otherworldly [sounds]. I'm pressing the keyboard and getting goose bumps, going: 'Oh my gosh. This sounds like it could be one of the creatures from the game!'”
Crashing beams and indescribable beasts are only one part of Still Wakes the Deep’s journey, however. There’s also a personal side to the lives of those caught in its unfolding disaster. To capture this, Graves shifted to the more intimate, almost romantic focus of a string quartet. It’s an aspect used sparingly. One that Graves wanted retained only for pivotal moments.
The environment (and music) grow progressively twisted as the rig becomes corrupted.
©The Chinese Room
“Once we dialed in that sound, Daan said: ‘So let's talk about how the strings are gonna play on top of the sculpture for all the scary stuff,’" says Graves. "And I said: ‘They're not. Let's just save the strings for the sensitive, more tragic cues, because then they'll really mean something when they come in and you get that really upfront mix that's super wide and emotional. It'll hit you the way it wouldn't if they were doing stuff all the time and just turning into wallpaper.'
“And again, in a very collaborative, open-minded sort of way, [Daan said]: ‘Sure, let's try it and see what happens.’ And they never asked for strings to go anywhere else. We only kept them in those scenes, and I think they have a big impact both in the game and when you listen to the soundtrack.”
With elements starkly different in both emotion and instrument choice, the final goal was to thread a line between them. To ensure that the two halves of the game’s score felt congruent. For this, Graves needed an undercurrent to the entire suite.
“That was the next thing,” Graves recalls. “If we're not using the strings in the scary stuff, what else are we gonna do? It's not just gonna be banging and bowing the sculpture. No, we need more than that. So that's when I thought about having a base synthesizer. Not synthesizers, plural, with a bunch of pads and Blade Runner kinds of sounds. Just one synth.”
Enter Moog, a local synthesizer manufacturer who invited Graves for a tour and supplied a bespoke edition of a bass synth for him to incorporate into the Still Wakes the Deep soundtrack.
Graves was given a bespoke synthesizer to settle the score.
©Jason Graves
“It's an old school synth, I think it came out in like ‘72,” says Graves. “So chronologically speaking, it works great for a game that's set in the ‘70s. It's got that vibe, but it has no presets. You don't just click through presets and go, I want a big fat bass. No, I want a clicky base. You have to turn all the knobs. And it's in turning all those knobs that you discover all these crazy sounds, and that's what you hear on the score – all these growling shrieks and even kind of high-pitched screaming. But then you also get the wonderful, John Carpenter Halloween kind of bass, too.
“The bass is underpinning everything. Most of the time when the strings come in, sometimes it's thin. But if there's any low end, the bass is down there as a really solid foundation. Being very warm and emotional with your relationship with the characters in the game, and then it can turn around in a heartbeat and be as nasty and evil and distorted as you want it to.”
Crucially, Graves felt he could approach both sides to the soundtrack in his own manner. He had complete faith in The Chinese Room as a developer to handle accurately representing the game’s distinct era and setting.
"There's a fine line in films and in games, when you're scoring anything especially geographically specific, between underscoring drama and sort of making it sound like a documentary,” says Graves. “And I mean a documentary in a bad way. We don't want to have anything that starts sounding too appropriated. And I don't mean a political way. I mean in a musical way, because the point of the music wasn't to say: ‘Hey, by the way, we're off the coast of Scotland.’ Believe me, if you play the game, you're gonna understand that, because everyone is authentically Scottish.
“The Chinese Room did all this research into, not just the technology of the ‘70s, but Scotland in the ‘70s. … It was so hardcore Scottish that I knew I could go in the opposite direction. There was no need for me to really reference anything like that. And that's creative freedom, because I was able to just paint things emotionally through a non-geographically biased lens.”
Positively brimming with Christmas cheer.
©The Chinese Room
One thing that’s readily apparent is that Still Wakes the Deep offered a working relationship Graves found extremely productive. So much so, that on occasion he even succeeded in jump-scaring himself.
“Especially at night, if I'm listening on headphones, previewing mixes, and starting to drift off,” Graves laughs. “Oh man, I've woken up my wife more than once! She's like: ‘What's the problem?’ I'm like: ‘Nothing, I just scared myself!’ Yeah, I should be used to it by now, but it works every time.”
He’s taken a knife to our nerves through numerous soundtracks already, but Graves is still hungry to experiment within the horror genre. And when fans connect with new aspects of his work, it remains a delight each time.
“It’s very moving when people respond to it on an emotional level,” says Graves. “Especially the difference between the cues. Something that maybe started sounding a little trite and conceived to me, that was mysterious and super simple, ends up being someone's favorite part of the whole score.
“That's what I love, people with their eyes closed, but they're listening to the music and experiencing the music on its own, and it's still telling a story for them. That's the ultimate goal for me because I love telling stories and speaking through musical emotion, as cheesy as it sounds.”
Our thanks to Jason Graves for taking the time to speak with us. Find more of his work on his website. Test your mettle against the Still Wakes the Deep soundtrack on Spotify here.
