Urban Jungle

Extremely wild, indeed -- born from a nightmare and brought to life is a quite fitting tale for a soundtrack like Rain World’s. With James’ weeklong musical foray behind him, he was able to completely win over his soon-to-be partner. The new duo founded Videocult, the platform that made this brutal indie platformer a reality. With the game’s original creator Joar Jakobsson at the helm, while James doing what James does best, the team started their quest to create what is now the esoteric and elegantly brutish Rain World.

Black Moonlight

Getting in on the ground floor of this game's creation was a unique and creatively liberating experience for James. Crafting the game world became natural for him, and helping to direct where the game was headed created unique instances for Mr. Primate to use his musical ideas to dictate the game’s core ones. In reference, James had this to say about his musical freedom:

“In addition to the music and sound effects, I also did the level design and much of the narrative design and world-building as well. So for me it was very cool to be able to have these many aspects influence each other and really dive deep into a specific atmosphere.

Building off of Joar’s established mood and aesthetic, I could either conceive of a visual scene or set-piece in level design, such as climbing a huge structure through the clouds, and write music which captured that mood. Or I could write a piece of music conveying some specific feeling, and then write a scenario to accompany that atmosphere.”

Threat - Garbage Wastes

James truly felt that the freedom to compose alongside the ongoing level design “allowed [him] to be extremely self-indulgent, proposing entire regions and plot elements simply because [he] wanted to write music for it.” In a very real and tangible way, Rain World’s soundtrack and game became a marriage early on. This synthesis is what I think makes not only the game, but its music, a truly and unequivocally unique experience.

Threat - Shoreline

James’ musical style is unique, to say the least. From field recordings, to what is known as “junk audio,” the use of everyday objects to create a musical landscape, James’ musical language is definitely a rare breed. Alongside an array of MIDI keyboards including his trusty go-to Novation Launchkey 49, iPads, and an ASUS laptop, James began crafting his nightmare-fueled vision into a reality.

“For the Rain World soundtrack, I was interested in low bit synthesis, wavetable synthesis and realtime audio sample manipulation, so anything I could get my hands on that did those things were used and experimented with.”