Album released 21/09/25
After Light Fades is a magical sokoban-style puzzle journey about grief, memory, and transformation.
You play as Alice, who, after the loss of her partner Aura, discovers seven artefacts tied to powerful memories. To heal, she must revisit the places they once shared and cast each artefact into an abyss, where each world reflects a stage of Alice’s emotional journey. As you part with each artefact, you also give up the unique mechanic it granted, turning the act of puzzle-solving into a powerful reflection on letting go.
The After Light Fades music draws on an enigma of unspoken conversations. Interlaced recurring ideas in the music shadow an internal space where tacit thoughts might echo or resonate with others into something tangible, if fleetingly. The music composition process was infused with many reflections on withheld and obfuscated communication, including the enigmatic relationship between the game’s protagonists Alice and Aura. During the composition process, undercover police were charged with infiltrating environmental activist groups by subversively marrying and having families with activists, all for the purpose of gaining police access to protest plans and arresting protest organisers, and subsequently abandoning those families through deceipt and false identities. Having been caught, one of them wrote the following to his victim: “I hope you will understand when I say that so many things never went anywhere. … There is no black and white, only a huge grey area in which I was trapped.” At the same time, western governments waged, armed, financed and made excuses for several more wars in the middle east under the pretence of “weapons of mass destruction” or “terrorism”, yet evidence has not been provided to the public they represent and international bodies such as the UN and Amnesty contradict government claims while critical journalists etc have been sanctioned, arrested and had equipment and records confiscated, suggesting blatant suppression of the real conversations about the wars. Attempting to create amidst these and other subversive and violent events was challenging (who has patience for such frivolity during war, leaving yet more unsaid…) and uncensored conversations about the creative process with friends and colleagues all the more precious and essential. The music draws yet again on irregular relationships between just tuned intervals, but also space and reflection became defining characteristics of the After Light Fades music as a result of the multifaceted creative process, which is playfully developed through electronic manipulation of the acoustic instrumental sounds. Meanwhile, Alice’s profound journey of letting go, despite ultimately discovering so much of her life was a lie, remains an undefinable process, even by music, so the music is very much focussed on generating space for reflection on such puzzling personal processes.
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Album released 23/02/2023
To save her dodo family from the Spectre of Extinction, Joon journeys through forests, oceans, caves and more to find and hatch their eggs, discovering new challenges, gifts and powers in each realm.
The score for Joon Shining is a 5 and 7-limit just intonation video game soundtrack featuring full-choir, orchestra and a variety of primitive instruments such as shell horn, bone clap sticks and hunting whistles. Most of the instruments are sample-based, apart from a few notable live performances such as the guitar in Arogana and a wide variety of noises.
Just intonation is employed as a musical ode to the kinds of tunings that were used in orchestral performances of the 17th century when the last dodos lived. In this sense, the music resurrects historical tunings (and instruments) from obscurity just as Joon resurrects the dodos. All 13 pieces on the album are tuned using only small number ratio thirds and fifths and a couple of 7ths. Sound design in the game is tuned in the same way.
Interview with I Tie