ANIMALMYN by James Primate

`* A N I M A L M Y N *`

MUSIC FROM THE VAPORWARE


"In the commercial wastes of an ancient computronium slum, a new digital soul awakens."


In 2017, after releasing the 1.5 version of Rain World, most of our work became waiting. So Joar and I set out experimenting with tools and ideas to determine what would be our next big project. There were quite a few concepts that we developed and toyed with, to various stages of playability, and then had to set down for various reasons. The most advanced of these was called ANIMALMYN.

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ANIMALMYN is/was a 3rd person 3D game with a strange PS1 style visual aesthetic. It may sound somewhat familiar when described:

In a post-singularity far future, AI was never solved but over time uploaded human consciousness has become plentiful. Abundant. These immortal souls can live and work forever. Naturally capitalism has found a use for them.

You, the player character, awaken in a bizarre world; a broken down app store or digital mall marketplace. You and a crowd of thousands of other "new souls" exist and function (for now) as sentient, feral emoji, scavenging and squabbling with each-other to be utilized for the trickle of automated commerce that still exists.

Over the course of the narrative its an adventure through this ancient abandoned digital mall, so the aesthetic is an infinity of glitchy advertisements, sentient product mascots, marketplace software gone insane from age and degradation, and other digital souls, "animalmyn", living like the protagonist.


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The concept of ANIMALMYN inspired me greatly, and I became somewhat obsessed with panting a musical landscape for this strange world and its narrative. Rather than, say, writing a few demo tracks and then waiting to see if the game concept became viable (like a reasonable person), I instead disappeared into my own head and emerged a month later with over 40 tracks of complete insanity.

Eventually the game concept ran its course, and we moved onto other things (I believe the correct decision as you will see soon), and all that's left now is this soundtrack. A soundtrack to a game that will never exist.


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The music is divided into a few sections. The introduction tracks were intended to set the tone and atmosphere for the beginning narrative beats of the game: initial exploration of this broken digital mall world.

But the Suites are the real meat of the work. They are sets of theme-and-variation on found sounds, samples taken from actual cassette tapes used as mall background music in the late '80s and '90s. These were to be used for areas of the game that would be returned to over the course of the narrative, changed, and the hope was that the listener would be able to hear and be moved by the progression of the theme through the deconstruction and reassembly of these "sample motifs". And then there are more traditionally music-like interludes so the ears don't bleed too much.


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These next words might seem silly when listening through, but its a work I'm really proud of! Completely unhinged self-indulgent experimentation, with not a thought to anything else. I'm glad it happened. I'm glad its out of my system.

Love to you all!
--J

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