When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

David Holmes, composer and DJ, made the music for such Soderbergh films as Out of Sight and Haywire, plus every film in Soderbergh’s Ocean trilogy. All of those films have great sounds — Out of Sight’s soundtrack is so sharply put together that the last time I saw the movie, parts of the film fell away into memories of the soundtrack album — but one of these discs has driven me through work in a way the others have not: Ocean’s Twelve.

We can talk about the movie itself someplace else. This is about the sound.

As a writer, I find something about the energy and juxtaposition on this disc propulsive. The way the graceful charm of Ornella Vanoni’s “L’Appuntamento” transitions into the bassy, distorted verve of Holmes’s own “$165 Million + Interest (Into) The Round Up” takes me from contemplation into action. (The back half of that “Round Up” sometimes grates on me, though.)

For writing or play, you’ve got a slew of playful and melodramatic tracks here that build in terrific ways. “What R We Stealing” and “The Real Story” have terrific energies. “Yen On A Carousel” is a fantastic, uplifting sound for a swanky victory pulled from an ugly defeat.

Want to just get a taste of this? Two additional tracks came out as a single from this album: “Amsterdam” and “I Love Art… Really!” Both are repetitive motifs that loop well to create a bit of playful fun for any con.

My favorite piece out of all of these, though, is the dramatic, grandiose, complex sound of “7/29/04 The Day Of.” I play that track for dramatic arrivals, travel montages, moments of ecstatic panic, and all sorts of spirited scenes. The moment around 1:49, when the track gets anxious, is a great dramatic shift if you can nail it. If you miss it in the moment, the through-line sound of the track is still great for action-packed heists.

The mid-century-style swagger and cool on this album reminds me of Lalo Schifrin’s original Mission: Impossible sounds with all the military vibes stripped out. It’s a great sound for surreptitious antics and heisty shenanigans.

I bought Ocean’s Twelve on CD… I can’t remember where. It’s available, disc and download, from Amazon, iTunes, and elsewhere.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

I’ve written about Indiana Jones elsewhere this week, so I thought I should take a post to underline this wonderful set. John Williams’s musical scores for the Indiana Jones movies are classics. Each one contains a host of unique and stirring themes and each one runs a range from mysterious to adventurous. I do a lot of writing to these scores and I’ve been using them in RPG play since forever.

I had to seek out the Temple of Doom score as a Japanese import years ago because it was otherwise out of print on CD. (I also have it on vinyl.) Now you can get all the scores alone or together as disc or download, including a bonus disc of tracks from the first three films. Get them. These are musts for any soundtrack collection.

I got the physical boxed set of the complete collection as a gift when it came out. Recommended.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

I thought Jason Graves was a strange choice for Tomb Raider at first. I associate his name with Dead Space, where I first heard of him, and I’m not familiar with the soundtracks for those games yet. The big thing that Lara Croft has been missing, musically, in my opinion, is a terrific theme. Would Jason Graves provide that?

Sort of. Tomb Raider features a pretty decent theme for Lara Croft… but we barely get to hear it in this score and I remain skeptical whether it’s a theme that we’ll hear build or expand in follow-up games. Even the Lara Croft movies failed to stick to a musical theme for her. A shame.

Having played Tomb Raider now [here's my review] I see why Jason Graves was chosen. It’s sort of an adventure game but it’s definitely a survival game — and it’s sometimes horrific. Graves brings urgency, dread, melancholy, and hope to the score, especially through wonderful percussion motifs, but the menace and action is often frantic. I’ve listened to the score a few times now but my first impression was that it was too aggressive to fall into the background while I wrote. Yet I have it on now and the sound is coming across as something more varied than my first listen suggested. So I’ll give it a shot for certain writing projects — I certainly enjoy the textured strings and variety of percussive elements in here.

If Graves can build on the Tomb Raider theme here in a future game, I’ll be happy.

I got Tomb Raider from the Amazon MP3 store.

I’m happy to tell you that I’ve got four new posts scheduled to appear at Gameplaywright this week, all of them stemming from my experience with the new Tomb Raider game — and none of them covering the stuff that I’m still contemplating, really. You’ll still get short soundtrack reviews here this week, but the meatier posts are over there at GPW, so check those out if you’re so inclined.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

Lair Soundtrack

John Debney and Kevin Kaska composed a stirring and bold score for the ill-fated video game, Lair, about dragon-riding knights doing battle across fantasy kingdoms. Though I haven’t played Lair, I got into its world a bit through the now-defunct website and world-building designs on display there. The artists behind the game considered the looks of everything from textiles and banners to palaces and cities, creating a sense of the place and culture even without the story within the game to carry me through it. That’s what got me looking for the soundtrack, as I recall, and I’m glad I found it. This is a go-to soundtrack for me when I’m writing or playing fantasy material.

Some tracks, like the main title, are combinations of proud horns, sweeping strings, and dramatic choral pieces — what the kids might call “epic.” That same track, though, also contains a contemplative melody that suggests more than bombast. The whole soundtrack is like that — a great mix of moods and motifs without being scattered. This is a complete work for a single world that easily transplants to other fantasy realms for play.

Speaking of play, the way these tracks are built makes them great for mood-setting in RPG play. The track called “Diviner Battle” opens dramatically, serving as a nice mood-setter, before driving into a menacing mix worthy of battle. “Blood River,” “Serpent Strait,” and numerous other tracks provide great background music for combats heroic and frantic. One of my most played, though, is “Firestorm,” which has a great vocal motif and a marching forward momentum — good for action of various sorts, not just battle — so it feels as much like music for a rescue as it does a heroic combat.

“Funeral Pyre,” meanwhile, is a short moody piece great for backing up sorrowful remembrance or a bit of ominous exposition. The Diviner’s theme is a foreboding piece that turns triumphant, great for the darkness before the march to dawn. “Ruins of Mokai” is a wonderful short piece for sadness, grief, or even bitter victory.

Probably my most played track of all these, though, is “Darkness Theme,” which I’ve used for mournful allies and complex villains alike. This was, more or less, the theme for the enemy queen in my Viking-themed D&D 4th Edition game, though I also used it for various other magical practitioners from her tradition, so it wasn’t easy to tell if this was “bad guy music” or not.

Lair is a terrific soundtrack. While it’s a shame that we probably won’t get sequel games with sequel scores to expand on this world, Lair gives us a terrific source of music for fantasy-adventure games with the added bonus that your players probably won’t associate its themes with baggage or recollections from this or that film. Recommended.

I bought Lair at the iTunes store.