ilomilo

When the project started, me and Daniel tried to find songs that would serve as inspiration for the music in ilomilo. So we started a collaborative playlist on Spotify.
Here’s a list of the songs on it:

La Veillée – Yann Tiersen
Toy Piano – Pony Up!
Ukulélé Man – Yann Tiersen
Prière N 3 – Yann Tiersen
Us – Regina Spektor
The Ghost Of Corporate Future – Regina Spektor
Rhuubarbidoo – Mum
School Song Misfortune – Mum
Presents – Tom Waits, Crystal Gayle
I Solljuset Fina – Karin Juel, Sune Waldimirs Orkester
Please Wake Me Up – Tom Waits
Wooden Heart – Elvis Presley
Going Up The Country – Canned Heat
Sur le Pont D’avignon – André Claveau and Mathé Altéry
The Swimming Song – Loudon Wainwright III
Delia’s Gone – Eric Bibb
Humoreske – Antonín Dvorák
My Creole Belle – Mississippi John Hurt
Staralfur – Sigur Rós
Teardrop – Massive Attack
Melodia bailable para Ukelele – Nut
See Your Face Again – Uni and Her Ukelele
The Dissappointing Pancake – Lisa Loeb
Innocent When You Dream (78) – Tom Waits
Soldier’s Things – Tom Waits
Time – Tom Waits
Hallway Cruise – Danny Elfman
Ma Maren Ma – Fanfare Ciocarlia
Mr. Kaizer, Hans Constanse Og Meg – Kaizers Orchestra
Bubamara – Dr. Nelle Karajlic, Vojislav Aralica, Dejan Sparavalo
Bardomshemmet – Ernst Rolf
The Part You Throw Away – Tom Waits
The Last Rose Of Summer – Tom Waits
Lost In The Harbour – Tom Waits
Watch Her Disappear – Tom Waits
Fawn – Tom Waits
Om Du Möter Varg – Detektivbyrån
Hus Vid Havet – Detektivbyrån

If you have Spotify, just click here to listen to the playlist.

When production of the first prototype began I was asked to write a few in game tracks and some basic sound effects. This time me and Simon had been listening to Yann Tiersens accordions and glockenspiels and felt it would be a nice addition to the music. Old European and Russian cartoons and doll movies served as a good source of inspiration for both music and sounds. I also looked in to how Disney used instruments to create sound effects in their old short films.

A few months later the production of the actual game had started and I was assigned to the project again to create all of the music and sounds. The art had bloomed into this massive imaginative playground of colors, toys and weirdly cute creatures. To have the music keep up with the art, it had to bloom just as much. The first thing I thought of was to add live instruments. Because I’m not a schooled musician I don’t actually play any instrument and rarely us it in my music, but now I felt it was necessary. Luckily I had managed to convince our producer to give me a lot more time than usual, so instead of a few weeks I had months to spend on this project. Therefore it felt safe to start experimenting.

I ran around and borrowed instruments from all my friends and went to toy and music stores to find anything that could make sounds. Accordions, ocarinas, flutes, guitar zithers, glocken spiels, nose flutes, kazoos, toy boxes and so on. With the help of my college Daniel Anttila (who is now the music and sound director for another one of Southends upcoming titles) I even built an instrument out of an old IKEA bench and some guitar strings. I named it Mukon.

Mukon

With all these new toys, ideas and inspiration I started to record. But because of my lack of skill and practice with many of the instruments (I really had to struggle with some of them) a lot of the recordings were off beat and out of tune. It even sounded like the music was performed by a children’s orchestra at times. I couldn’t help but love it. Maybe because I felt it matched with the “perfect is boring” philosophy of the art. This definitely added the layer that was missing.

Although I got better at playing the instruments the more I struggled, some parts were just too difficult for me to even begin to try. Some instruments just sound plain bad if you don’t have months or even years of practice before, so to solve this issue I took advantage of my network of musician friends. So far I have borrowed the talents of seven other people. I’ll introduce you to the ilomilo orchestra in a later post.

Here is a comparison of a track in two stages. The first clip is the song in a demo stage and the second is produced with live instruments.

I wrote the first song for Ilomilo at the same time we were working on the first conceptual trailer of the game. Back then the world of ilomilo was still young and under development, but Simon had already created this wonderful art style and we felt the music had to be equally unique to somehow match. There weren’t much time for me to start experimenting so we had to find some inspirational music that were very close to what we wanted in the game. We went through all kinds of tracks, I’m not going to list them here, but finally one of my old favorite bands from Iceland came up; Múm. Together with some other inspirations it felt like a perfect match. I have always wanted to create a project close to what they do, so it felt quite natural to take the music in that direction. Simon provided me with some toy sounds he had recorded earlier. I used them to create some nice instruments.

The track I ended up writing became the theme of ilomilo. I like to think it later inspired the rest of the team to further develop the world. You can hear it on the title screen and parts of it in various songs thought the game. It is also used in the first official trailer here on the blog. I’ll leave it at that for now. Keep checking this blog for more posts about the music and sounds of ilomilo.

Listen!