When they’re supposed to scare – they scare, in need of suspense – they deliver, and when the ground under our feet collapses (even literally) – they bring it out as well. Both electronic and „organic” music do what they need to. The violinists go crazy – sometimes with flutes and brass, drummers hit anything they can, and vocalists whisper with the enthusiasm of religious zealots other times, they paint an apocalypse not undeserving of Bloodborne. The matter is very similar when it comes to the more „organic” part of the horror, namely when the instruments have not been heavily processed (at least not more heavily than current audio standards need them to be). To the rescue comes the legacy of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Fortunately, even despite the lack of originality, the sound design aspect still does its job: it haunts us, glues the atmosphere together and will definitely contribute to any cardiac arrests during gameplay or stand-alone listen-throughs.
More often, though, there isn’t much to praise for, and moreover, the idea of using sounds of environment in the soundtrack is not a new notion. The mastery is not purely technical from time to time, the soundtrack brings out gems so beautiful that it begs the question why they were not more present in the listener’s ears.
This information is a very important one, because one of my first thoughts after listening was how heavily it involves, and how well it incorporates, sound design – apparently, for Yanagi dark ambient is a piece of cake. Music in The Evil Within 2 was the responsibility of Masatoshi Yanagi, one of sound designers working on the first installment in the series. In its previous incarnation, The Evil Within tortured us with an aura of dense, overwhelming music made by Masafumi Takada. Contemporary artists thus reach into the depths of sound design and recruit hordes of possessed violinists, percussion players, vocalists. The fundamental notions of this relatively hermetic subgenre and its evolution have led to a situation, where it’s pretty easy to compose a good soundtrack, yet one has to perform difficult acrobatics for the score not to disappear between other, just as dreadful soundtracks (while also what scares us is often the new and what we don’t know). For a composer, horror music is a tough nut to crack.