33 Immortals
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33 Immortals is an action-packed cooperative game in which departed souls rebel against God’s final judgment, fighting for their eternal life. The world created by the Thunder Lotus team is based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, an inexhaustible well of rich literary ideas I was able to draw inspiration from for the music.
The studio wanted the soundtrack to feel medieval, religious, sacred and epic. We knew that the human voice would play an important role in shaping its texture. In collaboration with Italian composer Alessandro Garino, we wove fragments of La Commedia’s ancient Italian text into the music, transforming them into rhythmic, religious-like mantras.
Beatrice, embodied in the music through the voice of Jeanne Laforest, serves as a guide, a beacon of hope and support for the rebellion. The choir is the rebellion itself: A unified force that surges in defiance at moments of heightened intensity. I wanted to avoid a purely classical vocal approach, as the game’s theme, emancipation from the stronghold of religious institutions, called for something more untamed.
Throughout the composition process, I kept returning to this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
“Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church, begins to suffer the effect of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs, a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.”
Imagining and bringing to life a musical representation of Inferno and Purgatorio has been a pleasure, and I’m eager to get started on Paradiso, which will be included in a future version of the game and its soundtrack.
Music composed, arranged and produced by Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis
Soloists:
Jeanne Laforest - Vocals
Mélisande Corriveau - Viola de Gamba
Choir:
The Sofia Session Choir
conducted by Georgi Elenkov
Italian choir writing and additional arrangements by Alessandro Garino
Mastered by Harris Newman