Bastion Soundtrack Interview

Geek Piki had a chance to quiz Bastion’s composer Darren Korb and comes back with an interview in which the processes and inspirations behind the title’s soundtrack, the voice acting and more all get tackled. Here’s a sampling:

PG: Walk me through your creative process. How involved was the rest of the team in that?

DK: My process changed throughout the project a bit, depending on where the game was at when I was writing a given piece. Basically, we would have a chat about what function we needed a piece to serve, like (we need town music) or what have you, and I would go off and whip something up. Then I’d send it out to the team for feedback. That much of the process was consistent throughout. Sometimes later on, my writing would also be informed by art or levels that already existed.

PG: What made you go for this worldy-blues-Asian-retro-rock style of music? If you have a better term for it, I’m all ears!

DK: [As mentioned above,] I call Bastion’s music (acoustic frontier trip-hop.) I knew that I wanted to do something I hadn’t really heard before in games. I was used to hearing either electronic stuff, hard rock stuff, orchestral stuff, or some combo of all three. I wanted to make Bastion’s music very eclectic so that it implied something other-worldly. I included acoustic elements and some familiar instruments to ground it in a place that’s easily accessible, but I also wanted to include some more global sounds that aren’t as familiar to most people to give it a sense of exoticism. I also wanted to use mostly urban-style sampled percussion to give the music a sort of modern twist.

PG: The instrumentation seems to go from blues to Middle-Eastern and then mix it all together in a matter of moments, so how did you maintain this contrasting style?

DK: I’m not really sure, to be honest! When I was writing it, it didn’t seemed to be contrasting, if that makes sense. I chose elements that I though would compliment each other, within the genre constraints I’d laid out for myself, even though they might not traditionally go together.