SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-11

Soundtrack: Blue Prince — A manor where even the music gets drafted

Trigg & Gusset (Bart Knol & Erik van Geer)

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #blue-prince #dark-jazz #bass-clarinet #ambient

Introduction — a bass clarinet on the menu screen

Boot the game and, in front of the floor plan of Mount Holly, 'Stories of All Manor' begins. Over piano and dusty synths, Erik van Geer's bass clarinet crawls slowly by. The kind of sound people call dark jazz. Out of habit I tried to clock it in BPM and failed three times. It drifts somewhere around 60, but the beat unravels as fast as you can count it. Rubato — music where the performer holds the clock.

It was written by the Dutch duo Trigg & Gusset: Bart Knol (piano, synths, programming) and van Geer (bass clarinet), who met at jam sessions in Delft around 2010 and have released records since 2013. Blue Prince is their first game score. Across the 32 tracks and two-plus hours of the OST, percussion almost never appears. The manor that Komugi's review scored 9.5 looks just as strange from the music side.

A manor that doesn't ring — the music lives in the rooms

Most of Blue Prince's exploration is close to silent: footsteps, creaking doors, the scratch of drafting. Music rises only in particular rooms, at particular moments — the way 'Simon's Theme' starts when you enter the Music Room. In a game where you draft rooms every day, the music itself behaves like a rare room: the fact that it plays at all is an event.

Knol says in an interview that for atmospheric game music, 'you have to make sure that no sound interferes with the gameplay' — players must not misread the score as a signal that something just happened in the game. The emblematic detail: he stripped every mechanical 'clang' of the keys out of van Geer's bass clarinet recordings. Blue Prince is a game where even a stain on the wall looks like a clue. The music was not allowed to impersonate information.

And the sparseness itself was a deliberate call by developer Tonda Ros (Dogubomb), not the band. Trigg & Gusset's other albums are far denser with rhythm and texture. The restraint is design, not style.

Even the music gets drafted — one writes sketches, the other places them

The project began when Ros, who had been listening to Trigg & Gusset on Spotify, emailed them about a year and a half before release. Early builds used existing tracks — 'Sea & Wind,' 'Ominous Clouds,' 'Dim,' 'Dark Matter' — as placeholders, and those became the starting points of the whole OST.

Here is the part I love. Knol saw only a few screenshots and fragments. He wrote not finished pieces but a pile of sketches, and Ros decided which composition belonged in which room. One person writes the cards; the other drafts them into the floor plan. The division of labor is exactly congruent with the game's own mechanic. Even the music got drafted.

'Ovinn Nevarei,' the track for reaching Room 46, has a backstory. The first sketch starred bell sounds and was called 'Bells of Eternity.' The bells didn't fit, so they were swapped for piano chords and synths, and the file became 'Bells of Eternity 2 with No Bells.' An eternity of bells, minus the bells. One more: at 2:33 near the end of 'Lessons of the Past' you can hear a metal fence near Knol's studio creaking as it slowly opens — recorded by running a long cable out with a microphone.

The puzzle analogy — remove the percussion and the clock disappears

Drums are clocks. Evenly spaced hits keep telling you which beat you are on. But a day in Blue Prince is made of long stretches of staring at the rooms you drew. If something were ticking in the background, every long think would sound like being late. By discarding percussion entirely, this OST refuses to measure the player's thinking time. The rubato lines stretch and contract at the same speed as thought.

Baba Is You's chiptune is a loop that pushes you back into retry; Stephen's Sausage Roll chose near-silence. Blue Prince's answer sits between: silence as the floor, music as punctuation. 'Call it a Day' at day's end, 'Ovinn Nevarei' beyond the door. On the whole I believe long thinking needs reverb, not rhythm.

Tracks worth hearing

Official audio lives on Trigg & Gusset's own YouTube channel and Bandcamp. Three to start with.

・Stories of All Manor ↗ — the front door of the OST. The slow bass clarinet line announces everything this album is.

・Foundation ↗ — guest Jurren Mekking's electric guitar quietly holds up the structure of an ambient piece, until a handful of bass clarinet notes descend near the end.

・Bandcamp: Blue Prince - The Original Soundtrack (all 32 tracks) ↗ — two hours and seven minutes from the top. Listen while confirming that percussion never once shows up.

Closing — what I would steal for my own music

Three things to steal. First, remove the percussion and erase the clock: a piece that does not measure the listener's time can sit beside work or thought without rushing it. Second, write music as a deck of draftable sketches rather than finished pieces, and leave the placement-in-context to someone else — or to your future self. Third, mix in exactly one real-world sound as a signature. One creaking fence gives a synthesized manor a body temperature.

If you relisten, make it morning. Brew black coffee as if starting the manor's day, and put on 'Westwardly Winds.' For manors and music I have also written about Daniel Olsén's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — that one is a nightmare that keeps revolving; this one is a daydream that resets every morning.