It all starts with wonder. Adventure as the longing expansion of thinking oneself another. A desire for the stars to burrow into the ground before us, enchantment as the very mechanics of our movement to grasp something that is not yet there. With all its tropes and pop-cultural repetition, it is easy to forget that fantasy, in essence, is mostly about redrawing the boundaries of the possible, even if it is itself presented in traditional forms. The Knightling does not set out to break new musical ground; within the terms of 21st century neoclassicism, with its fine ear for the romantic melodies latent within the substratum of post-rock, its subtle reformulation of popular chamber pieces of the classical tradition, and its flair for soundtrack structures, it posits something strangely rare within the world of videogame music: a wondrous story of its own.
The technical apparatus has marked VGM as variously useful, illustrative, immersive, complementary, a challenge of integration defined by long running times, repetition, and a cyclical listening logic. Lately, answers to this problem have come in the form of extended, long-form compositions that go on for hours upon hours, simply solving the issue by epic means. Yet most of these works are still troubled by fragmentation, by each piece’s usefulness, deriving into clear-cut sections that often hold strained relations to each other. Another way has been presented by soundtracks that are modular in nature, mirroring the programs they are attached to, relating all parts like a toolbox would its instruments, resulting in works of modern, variable structures. Although not exactly in this way, Tumult Kollektiv has already attempted these two paths with Hundred Days and Pine, the straightforward and the modular, and now, with The Knightling, they are doing something slightly different, distinctly neoclassical in grounding, which is to craft a musical story of its own that stands in parallel to the material it is attached to. I have not played the game, but it is easy to listen to this OST as an autonomous storytelling device, a mid-point between illustration and integration. From the beginning, it introduces a series of major themes that will recur throughout, which grow and develop, interact with minor themes, transforming in the process. In other words, in the face of quantitative and qualitative solutions to the problem of repetition, it chooses classical-romantic variety, a musical journey whose relationship to the game is dialogical, two artforms in collaboration.
And what a journey it is. With a chamber ensemble that includes players who will be well-known to ACL readers, such as Lucy Railton on cello, among others, the music sways with the patterns of neoclassicists like Dustin O’Halloran, Federico Albanese, or Sophie Hutchings, mobilized within the context of fantasy game soundtracks, a step outside the framework built by the likes of Jeremy Soule and his adoption of mid-century classical romances. Traditional forms, all, that yet evoke that youthful sense of approaching the unknown with an open mind, letting the world fill you with its presence. The main motif – which I assume is the game protagonist’s – would normally reaffirm its individuality before the unknown, strengthening its agency and capacity to control and mold it; here, instead, it is sweetly re-presented, again and again, within new contexts and melodies that slightly change it. The hero’s journey is here not about the return from enchantment with new power over reality, but about the loss of stable definition before mystery, a turn in which the hero is not a bridge, but one more element in the porous frontier between known and unknown.
As The Knightling shines, its light makes further visible the impact of recent popular, contemporary classical musical trends, cementing its possibilities for soundtracks. As VGM keeps developing its own orchestral and ensemble traditions beyond the scope of the cinematic, links to the present musical context will be crucial to the emergence of special works like this, embedded in various currents at once, and for which “the new” comes not from experimentation, but from gradually building upon the shoulders of giants. (David Murrieta Flores)