What are the first things that come to mind when you think of London? This can be the royal family and glamorous penthouses, casinos and stylish modern architecture that populate the roofs of the city. Or perhaps they are the cockney giants of the East End popularized by early Guy Ritchie films and British men like Danny Dyer. But if we talk about London sound, it should be dirty. From its beginnings in the capital's underground scene in the early 2000s, this genre has become one of the biggest musical developments in the UK for decades. For the new London PSVR action game Blood and Truth, developed by Sony's London Studio to authentically capture contemporary London, the integration of grime into an integral part of the sound is therefore self-evident. "You end up in the corner of a penthouse, then you're in a council town and whatever street you're on at night, it's still winding and it's beautiful and dark."Eyez In fact, it's a vicious cycle for Grime to play in a video game. The genre has its roots in the medium, its retro brips and MIDI sounds a favorite for sampling, from Street Fighter II to Wiley's "Godfather of Grime," to "Crash Bandicoot Freestyle." Grime producer Sir Pixalot had even brought to light an obscure Wolverine Mega Drive/SNES game from 1994, containing what could be considered the "first grime instrument". It's a sentiment shared by Eyez who, along with other grime artists including JME, Kamakaze and Ocean Wisdom, have contributed to the Blood and Truth soundtrack. "I'm also producing, so I'm using a lot of old school sounds and sound effects that you get from games," says Eyex. "Even Grime itself was created from a program called Fruity Loops (FL Studio), which is also used by gamers, so a lot of the sounds in our genre come from games."
You only live on earth
The game has more firecrackers than simple explosions (Image Credit: SIE London Studio) Of course, the dirt you hear in Blood and Truth has a world of difference. Focusing on immersing him as an action hero in his own blockbuster, one obvious influence has been the kind of great scores he gets from James Bond movies. But as a big triple-A action game set in modern London, the developers came up with the idea of mixing classical strings and brass with crimson bass and rhythms. Grime, forged by its grainy aesthetic, with production values like a 70-piece orchestra? As Dizzee Rascal would say, it sounds crazy! Skeptics may see this as a corporate studio trying to make their game more "streetwise" while also making it more "respectable"; I could even draw an allegory for the gentrification suffered by London in recent years. decades. . But for video game composers Joe Thwaites and Jim Fowler, it was really about combining two seemingly contrasting sounds to create something special, thanks to collaboration. "We recorded the orchestra (strings, brass and percussion), all separately, then gave them to Zdot, the grime producer, who remixed them and created different tracks," says Thwaites. . This is the Zdot rhythm by which Eyez attacks, punctuating key gameplay elements throughout the match, such as a frenzied shootout. In fact, if you play really well, pulling all sorts of tricks and headshots, not only do you get your gauge up on the badass-o-meter, but the bass and rhythms take over as you go. Let the soundtrack turn into dirt. For Eyez, the juxtaposition of orchestral dirt fits perfectly into London's mixed culture. "You have the upper and lower classes side by side," he says. "You end up in the corner of a penthouse, then you're in a council town and whatever street you're on at night, it's still winding and it's beautiful and dark." You could say that the orchestra, rather than uplifting the earth, stands respectfully on the same level, in the same way that Zdot takes orchestral stems and subverts them. "Although I have a lot of mischief, I enjoy music in different ways and worked with an orchestra when I was younger," says Eyez. "In the studio, it's so much more than just learning musically, seeing how these musicians work under pressure and doing things with instruments they don't normally do." "So someone plays the cello, bends it, and holds it in a weird way, trying to make a dirty sound that sounds like a playing sound, which is not normally the way you play it."
License to mix
We're used to car music in GTA, but Blood and Truth takes it to another level. (Image credit: SIE London Studio) Blood and Truth's creative use of music also goes for the licensed tracks, which aren't exclusively junk, like the car quest that opens for the first time on the track from Tim Deluxe's dance "Just Won't Do" on the radio. Although it starts out as the kind of diegetic music you've been waiting for, the composers are doing something much more subtle by fusing the licensed title with the orchestral score until it miraculously becomes the score itself. A truly immersive effect in virtual reality. Such a feat essentially requires an orchestral remix of the piece, which means getting the blessing of the piece's artists. "We've been very lucky to work on licensed music that we've built relationships with on Sony labels," says Thwaites. "We were able to build relationships with the artists on the song and they were excited to have orchestral versions of their song. "Many of them were also involved in the recordings and explained how we could do it in different directions. So it was a very collaborative project." "I don't think anyone can say it's stealing from our genre or our culture, it's actually pushing our sound into the gaming world."