Words by Mat Ombler

It’s not unusual for modern-day video game composers to record their scores with a live orchestra. When video game consoles ditched cartridges for CDs in the early ‘90s and Red Book audio became a new standard across the industry, composers such as Takayuki Hattori and Bruce Broughton started to use orchestras such as the Tokyo Philharmonic and the Sinfonia of London to record the music in I.Q.: Intelligent Qube and Heart of Darkness. 

What is unusual, however, is for a video game score to feature an orchestra and music systems that date back to over a century ago. In this case, the Gagaku music – Japan’s oldest surviving form of music – used in the score for Trek to Yomi, a stunning side-scrolling action game inspired by the works of legendary Japanese film maker, Akira Kurosawa.

“Every game has its own opportunity to flex and stretch its legs in different ways, but rarely is there an opportunity to go this deep on music and audio,” Cody Matthew Johnson, who co-composed Trek to Yomi’s score alongside Yoko Honda, tells Composer Magazine. “A lot of games don’t call for it – they’re inspired by the visuals or the story – but aren’t necessarily set in a hyper-specific time.”

It takes less than half an hour of playing Trek to Yomi to realise that what you’re experiencing isn’t just a lesson in the carefully choreographed cuts and stylish monochrome aesthetic of the Kurosawa films that inspired it, but also a history lesson in the rich musical culture of Japan. Trek to Yomi’s creator and director, Leonard Menchiari, wanted his game and its music to be an authentic representation of Edo period culture. So, after Johnson and Honda first met Menchiari at the 2019 Tokyo Game show, they set to work on writing music that remained true to his creative vision.

“We realised that there’s an opportunity here to accomplish a lot of different things,” Johnson says. “We can a shine a light on Edo period culture, but we can also showcase a lot of traditional instruments outside of the mainstream Japanese instruments that people know, like the shakuhachi and koto, and go a little deeper and bring some other instruments to light, specifically Gagaku style music – which isn’t really heard much by anyone from anyone outside of Japan – and bring that to the forefront.”

The end result is an authentic Edo period score that’s over two-hour long (not bad for a game whose seven chapters you can breeze through in less than six hours) with ancient instruments and music systems woven around a Gagaku ensemble featuring some of the finest players in the world.

Pulling this off wasn’t easy and involved a lot of heavy research to ensure every aspect of the music that the pair created was an accurate representation of how music was composed in the Edo period. This was especially difficult as Japanese music systems from that era feature wildly different uses of harmony and tonality in comparison to Western music theory, while the sounds and performance of Gagaku music can vary significantly depending on Geographic location, the class and status of the musicians performing it, and the context in which it’s performed. 

To make things even more challenging, all of this was done in the middle of the COVID pandemic. “Trying to learn and experiment with instruments that are about 5000 miles away and from 400 years ago during a pandemic? Not easy!” Johnson laughs.

That said, Johnson was able to tap into the knowledge of his co-composer Yoko Honda, who grew up in a village on the outskirts of Tokyo with links to the Edo period. While most of the music that Johnson and Honda wrote for Trek to Yomi was composed while the pair was apart, they were constantly bouncing ideas back and forth and sharing music cues with each other for feedback.

“Yoko was very helpful because she had more knowledge than me going into the project in terms of knowing what was appropriate and what wasn’t,” Johnson explains. “It’d be things like ‘invert the phrase, don’t go up to that specific note,’ or ‘hang on that note under this specific chord’. Because the game is so linear we effectively ended up doing spotting sessions, too. Being able to have Yoko as a guiding hand was invaluable and I was very grateful to have that.”

If learning all of these complex music systems and playing styles wasn’t challenging enough, the pair had to track down musicians who were able to play traditional Gagaku instruments such as the ryuteki (a transverse bamboo flute) and hichiriki (double reed bamboo flute). And as recordings took place in Tokyo during the pandemic, Japan’s strict COVID protocols meant that sessions often ended up getting paused or postponed. “We really had to search through our network to find the right people to bring into a safe environment,” Johnson explains.

A dream team for Trek to Yomi was eventually assembled after Johnson and Honda were put in touch with an orchestra contractor specialising in Gagaku music. And to top it all off, they ended up recording at Avako Studio in Tokyo working with Mary Shinohara, a highly respected engineer who recorded the music for another video game known for its cultural and historically authentic depiction of Japan: PlayStation’s Ghost of Tsushima.

“The contractor was excited because not a lot of people compose this style of music,” says Johnson. “We told him about what we wanted to do and he was like, ‘Great, I know all of the best Gagaku players in the world,’ so we got the best of the best and they were all super excited to be involved.

“They consistently went 30–60 minutes over our recording time on purpose to get these amazing takes for us. It was like a gnarly puzzle trying to figure all of this out with such a distant music system and instruments that we didn’t know. We’d write a bunch of music and record it, but sometimes we’d just throw up a click and be like, ‘play the 20 most idiomatic shamisen riffs of all time and just jam over this track,’ so we did these really long sampling sessions of these players just riffing in the true spirit of their instruments.”

With all of these recordings at his disposal, Johnson was able to tap into his knowledge and passion for sound design and industrial-style music production. While there are no wavetables or synths used in Trek to Yomi, the score takes a completely different direction following a pivotal moment at the end of chapter three, which plunges your character into the depths of Yomi – Hell.

This is where you’ll spend most of your time in the game as you spend the following three chapters hacking your way through demons and diving deeper into the belly of the underworld, the sounds of the Gagaku become more distorted. Strings are stretched into sombre refrains. Melodies clash like swords. Percussion blows are dealt with war-like velocity as they bellow out under the haunting whispers from ancient woodwind instruments. It’s all very avant-garde and it sounds absolutely terrifying. Yet, at the same time, Hell has never sounded so great.

“I scored chapter five and six using pretty much only the Gagaku recordings, with some drum hits and written music, but I’d say about 70% of it is just mangling the audio and going nuts – so it’s a completely different set of rules,” Johnson explains.

“While I didn’t touch a synthesiser and no wavetables were used, you can hear the influence in some of these things when I’m stretching out sounds, using filter modulation, or going apeshit with distortion and using a bunch of pitched stuff. These are all techniques that stem from EDM and industrial production; if a tool’s in the belt and it’s appropriate to pull it out, I’m gonna run it through a bandsaw. So that’s where [Trek to Yomi] was so much fun, deciding on which tools I could bring to this project without taking people out of that experience.”

Before you return to the land of the living in Trek to Yomi’s final chapter, your time in Hell comes to a cataclysmic close with what Johnson describes as “massive sounds of orchestrated chaos”. Here, Johnson wanted to distinguish the final moments of the game from the chaos that preceded it by leaning into silence and experimenting with sound frequency, all while showcasing the quality of the Gagaku recordings done using ultrasonic microphones, which Johnson believes might be “some of the highest fidelity Gagaku recordings ever”.

“Instead of having lots of music, we wrote this piece with just massive amounts of sub pressure.,” he says. “I took a performance of the Gagaku and time stretched so it’s rattling at like 20–60kHz, and that way there’s just this constant pressure. We also took a flute so there’s this shrill top and it’s almost like your ears are ringing with tinnitus with these sparse phrases. That was almost like a No Country for Old Men approach, where we make people feel very uncomfortable by not giving them music as a crutch to lean on.

“I’ve always loved dissonances and making people uncomfortable – creating unease with certain tones – so I learned a lot about how you can take something that’s actually quite beautiful and make it sound haunting by applying certain techniques, colours and treatments.”

With Trek to Yomi available through Xbox’s Game Pass subscription, which has over 25 million subscribers, Johnson hopes the game has provided an opportunity for more people to experience the rich history of Japan’s sonic landscape and music culture. He also encourages anyone that enjoyed the music in the game to check out the tracks on disc two of the soundtrack release, particularly the last five, which feature the Gagaku session players riffing out freestyle.

“I compel everyone to listen to those tracks!” he says. “The music is quite avant-garde, they’ve got multiple people playing the same melody but in different ways that blend together and create dissonance. I’m just thinking to myself, ‘this is Japanese jazz!’ How can you even comprehend writing this stuff?”

The soundtrack for Trek to Yomi can be streamed in full here on Spotify, or purchased on vinyl from the Devolver Digital store.