The eerie and enigmatic instruments driving the soundtrack of Alan Wake 2

○The website of Petri Alanko, a BAFTA-nominated Finnish musician who works as a video game and film composer, describes the artist and performer as “Deadline since 1990.” “I’ve never been late,” he boldly claims. If you’re a creator of any genre, you’ll probably read this article with a mixture of awe, suspicion, and disbelief. Deadlines are flexible, right? right?

“It’s not a boast. It’s more or less a promise of service,” Alanko laughs. “I’m good at scheduling my work, but I’m very cautious when interacting with others for the first time. Even if I help the client understand what they need, everything Not every client knows exactly what they want. I have to be a creative and an analyst, but also a crisis negotiator.” Producing Video Game Music is often chaotic. Composers need to be adaptable, lean, and adaptable, unafraid to kill loved ones or work to impossibly tight deadlines. It’s a testament to his dedication that Alanko ignores this as simply part of the job.

Alanko’s method is quite unconventional. His latest project, his Alan Wake 2, has been 13 years in the making, and the developer says Remedy has been trying to make his 2010 project for three generations of consoles. This is the sequel to the cult hit. The plot follows the eponymous protagonist and her FBI agent Saga Anderson in a winding, spiraling tale that oscillates between reality and a supernatural otherworld, as the lines between fact and fiction become blurred. (Literally, I don’t mind gore either).

But what does that look like? For Alanko, that meant dropping a piano off a forklift, lying on an ivory keyboard with a sex toy, tinkering with a custom-built “fear engine,” and playing with Mega Marvin, a “giant cowbell with sticks and sticks.” It was to play with devilish instruments (springs). Remedy gives the composer room to experiment, and the result is a perfect blend of eerie and accessible, easily on par with the arthouse movie hits that might run rampant at Cannes or Sundance. became.

To convey the atmosphere of Alan Wake 2’s hostile otherworld, Dark Places, Alanco tested and recorded how instruments sounded when left on, and when compressed or attenuated. . He experimented with feedback, recording sounds beyond the range of human hearing and bringing them into range to see how disruptive it was. He shrieked discordant notes and pushed woodwind and brass instruments to the limits of his software’s matrix of high-end recordings. “Eventually, some of the wonders of Remedy’s basement were brought in as well,” he says. “They happened to have a lot of very interesting equipment there, which was the Mega Marvin and the Apprehension Engine.”

Made famous by disturbing films such as The Witch and the Lighthouse, the AppHension Engine was once called “the scariest instrument of all time” by Brian Eno. Stephen King had a visceral reaction when he first heard this game in action (which is quite appropriate considering how closely Remedy’s “New Weird” games align with King’s work) But for Alanco, it was the key to solving the mystery. The dark and hostile atmosphere that Alan Wake 2 needed to evoke in his place.

“I can tell you it’s a tough thing to master, let alone play,” Alanko smiles when asked about this strange instrument. “Imagine the most frightening of any musical instrument, all rolled into one, whose sole purpose is to make sound. Noise contains some tonal content. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not, and usually they seem to do whatever they feel like doing. It’s often said that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing your instrument, you’re good to be a performer. In Apprehension Engine, it’s even less so. You start out in complete emptiness and stay there for a long time. A spring reverb tank, a clanking resonant metal rod, two string necks, a few strings, and a nickel harper. It’s a crank, electronic bow, active mic, and heavily distorted preamp all rolled into one.”

In short, it’s a “wonderful nightmare” and “almost on par with Alan Wake 2.” It just oozes fear. Balancing uneasily on the barrier between the familiar and the hellish, the Apprehension Engine effortlessly evoked everything Alanko needed for his Remedy game. This distorted sense of reality pulled the writer away from the real world and into a fever dream of his own creation, a limbo. There is a risk that it will spread to the real world as well.

It was important to Alanco to aurally mimic Wake’s mental breakdown. The character is something of a chimera between Alanco, lead writer Sam Lake, lead writer Clay Murphy, and director Kyle Murphy, who share more similarities than “we would care to admit, or perhaps could admit.” I’m sharing it with everyone. It was crucial to empathize with Alan and capture the sonic experience of his descent into (and descent from) madness.

“How I perceive writing music for my darkest emotions and mental states on Alan Wake 2 has to do with my early adulthood experiences and occasional personal struggles. ” says Alanco. “Fortunately, my experience is due to the environment and the general situation, and not due to the use of substances, for example.” But earthquakes can still cause fatalities. It takes a highly empathetic person to write a character who suffers from an unstable mental state.

Alanko’s dedication to his craft is evidenced by a full-sleeve tattoo of another bout of remedies he scored, “Control.” He said he already has ideas, drafts and concepts for what Alan Wake 3 will sound like. “As long as my heart is beating, I’m in this,” he says. “Music is very important to me.”