The Benthic Hour

You get an email inviting you to a celebration in the oceanside village you were born. You haven't been there in ages, but it would be nice to see what is essentially your family again. Nothing should go wrong!

Note that the cover rn is temporary haha jk unless

- Intro -

The Benthic Hour Is a narrative mystery about something very wrong happening in your home village by the ocean. It's heavily inspired by Spike Chunsoft mystery games (999, Danganronpa, Somnium Files) and other mysteries like Ghost Trick (play that). My goal with this soundtrack was to tell as much of that story as possible through the soundtrack, which meant making more songs for one album than I've ever made before. Not being able to make the same genre twice in a row (I dunno why it's the only way creativity/inspiration works for me) definitely complicated this, but I think I learned a ton about making a somewhat cohesive soundtrack! Special thanks to Alex Kale for hosting some more music jams that let me experiment with a ton of techniques and approaches that I got to try out here :>

- Story/Track Overview -

The general overview of the story is that once you get to the village you find yourself in a time loop. Every night something ends up happening where the village is destroyed and everyone is killed, including you. Somehow you wake up at the beginning of the day though, and so it's up to you to figure out what's going on. You uncover a laboratory researching strange technology, explore a sunken ship that has things it shouldn't, and uncover the true culprit.

Surface Level

This is the main menu song, essentially being the image prompt directly. I tried to make it quiet and somewhat distant/familiar-sounding with just the piano and guitar, as if it were overlooking the sea.

Familiar Faces

This is the song that plays for the first day you arrive at the village. You're catching up with all the residents and it's a great time! It's a bit awkward since everyone's  been living here their whole life, but they're mostly the same as you remember. The celebration is tomorrow, so you head to bed for some good sleep.

A Lively Catch

This is the second day at the village when you're mostly hanging out with your best friend from childhood. She's a bit of a gremlin that gets up to shenanigans, and you two have a ton of fun together. She's happy to have you here, though strangely most of the village, while friendly, seems to act weird when talking to you about the celebration that you were invited to. It's a real thing that's happening, but invitations aren't normal. You were born in the village though, so people are mostly accepting of it. Still, nobody's sure who sent it or why, it might have been a mistake?

Run It Back

This marks the turning point in the game, and this song would be played at the end of each loop. Before, instruments were familiar and bright. Not anymore. That night, while everyone is gathered around the docks, strange things begin to happen. A loud explosion is heard in the distance, interrupting the celebrations. At the same time, some people start collapsing. Everyone's been poisoned, including you. You only begin to see a massive whirlpool forming in the water with... something inside of it. Before you know it, you're completely unconscious.

This one is actually all of the other songs rendered, reversed, played at the same time and heavily processed. I used Emergence (a granulator), compression, spectral gate, disperser, vocodex, more compression, some reverb, and delay a bunch of times rendering all of it out etc etc. Also, un-snapping and automating the delay time can produce some REALLY cool textures!

Please Don't Touch the Electronics

After waking up you realize it's the same day looping in on itself, you decide to do some researching. Apparently a number of people from the village went missing a while ago. One of these people was the head of a sprawling marine biology lab which is now abandoned. After some more digging, you find out where this lab is located and begin exploring. While there you find a lot of research around the local marine life, their defense mechanisms, what they eat, and so on. One more recent line of logs details what appears to be camouflaging technology akin to that of an octopus they have in captivity. Eventually you come across some broken containers that appear to be where they were holding the octopus, but these are much, much larger than you would expect for a regular octopus.

Of all the Buttons to Press

In the final lab log, you learn that the specimen was taken from a ship that crashed just outside the docks a number of years ago.  While this is valuable knowledge, in getting this knowledge you've tripped a security system causing a countdown to begin before the lab destroys itself. While trying to escape, you notice a shadow moving away from you in the halls ahead. Trying to catch up to that shadow, you find yourself at a dead end. And with that, you explode with the rest of the lab before waking up in the morning.

There's Nothing in the Water

With the help of your friend, you manage to snag some diving gear and explore the ship you heard of in the logs. It's a large ship that has a number of cargo holds, though one of these holds was clearly keeping something alive and strange. There's bones of many large fish, some eaten cleanly through. 

A Really Big Shadow

It's dark, but something is moving down here. Whatever it is, it's at least as large as you and is aware of your presence. Given a sudden burst of confidence from your ability to not die, you boldly find yourself giving chase once more. It doesn't feel like it's running from you though, it's leading you somewhere deep in the ship. On the way you find a number of skeletons from the crew that didn't escape. When you get to the final dead end though, you find a body with a diving suit on. The suit has mostly kept the body in tact, and you recognize this person. This man is still alive, and he's in the town. Unfortunately before you can act on this information, you find that giving chase has depleted all of your air. You find yourself awake in the morning once more, ready to put all the pieces together.

The Benthic Hour

I'm not entirely sure exactly what happens in between the last song and this one, other than that you put together what the full story is. A number of years ago the ship crashed, and on it carried a strange octopus that was able to camouflage itself as people. It was injured, and the people on the crew tried to help. When the ship crashed, the creature was given to the head marine biologist to care for. With this creature he researched a technology that allowed him to become different people and he ended up not caring for the creature. The head of the marine lab is alive and has disguised himself as the man you found on the ship. He's set on stealing back the creature he lost and continuing his research with it. In order to do this he plans to take advantage of the one day of the year when it comes back and the village celebrates its arrival to kill everyone and capture it. It's actually the creature's power that was allowing you to loop through time, it's been helping you the entire time!

Now all you need to do is kill this crazed marine biologist who is hiding in his lab. This song plays while you're running through and giving him what's coming. (I still want to rework a lot of stuff around this ending but it is 3:17AM the day of and I... need... sleep........)