SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-04

Soundtrack: Machinarium — The arithmetic of loops that never go stale in a rusty world

Tomáš Dvořák (Floex)

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #machinarium #loop-design #found-sound #acoustic

Introduction — the sound of being dumped on a scrap heap

The game begins with a small robot being tossed onto a mountain of waste. In the first track, 'The Bottom,' what reaches your ear is a metallic melody reminiscent of Javanese gongs, the hard plucking of steel strings, and beneath them a pad whose outline has crumbled. The tempo is roughly slow enough that you give up counting. The smell of rust arrives before the beat does. In this dialogue-free, hand-drawn adventure that Komugi reviewed, the music carries the temperature of the world in place of words.

The composer is Tomáš Dvořák, a clarinetist from Prague who works under the name Floex and has been with Amanita Design since Samorost 2. The sound of Machinarium houses two tenants: the body heat of acoustic piano, clarinet and strings, and a Roland SH-01 borrowed from a friend — an analog synth with a dirty, unstable tuning that won't hold pitch. The palette of the music is neatly congruent with the game's art, where machines behave like living things inside hand-drawn backdrops.

The arithmetic of loops — repetition count and melodic concreteness are inversely proportional

In interviews Dvořák explains that back in the Samorost days he was making short loops of at most a minute, and there he internalized a law: short loops must be abstract. A melody that is too concrete becomes boring or annoying by the tenth listen. Point-and-click adventure is a genre where the player stands before a single screen with arms crossed for minutes at a time. Which means a track will cycle a number of times its author cannot predict. This 'indeterminacy of repetition count,' I think, is the condition peculiar to puzzle game music.

In Machinarium he pushes that law to its limit. By his own account, one of the hardest jobs on the soundtrack was 'Mr. Handagote' — finding the equilibrium point in a tug-of-war: melodic enough to enjoy on its own, abstract enough that boredom never rises no matter how many times it cycles. Listen to it. You feel you could follow it by whistling, yet somehow you can never quite grasp it. The melody is built like sand that keeps subtly changing shape in your hand. That is not an accident; it is mixing-ratio design.

A singing robot, a dream remix — hidden links between mechanism and music

In 'Clockwise Operetta,' a robot sings. Not with a recorded human voice: Dvořák reveals in interviews that he fed made-up lyrics to an old Apple speech synthesizer and had it sing, then built piano and clarinet around it. In the background, clocks keep ticking. In a robot town without dialogue, the one moment a 'voice' appears is an operetta sung by speech synthesis — an irony that doubles as a gentle parody of classical operetta, and as an answer to what 'song' could mean to the residents of this world.

There is a trick I love even more. In the room next door, the same piece plays in a hazy form processed with an effect called Spectral Blurring — in the composer's own words, like 'hearing the music in a dream or from a memory.' Step across the threshold, and the tune you just heard bleeds over to the memory side: locations stitched together by arrangement. And 'Gameboy Tune,' rejected for being too happy, survived as a song you can find by tuning a radio inside the game. Turning a discarded track into a sound that lives inside the world — recycling worthy of a scrap town.

This soundtrack also has a namesake shadow. Amanita has another Tomáš Dvořák, a sound designer in charge of effects. Floex says he borrowed the metallic samples his namesake had collected and used them as musical material. The sound effects and the music are literally cast from the same scrap. The world sounds continuous because, at ground level, they share the same footing.

The puzzle analogy — one room of thought, one room of music

The tempo of solving an adventure puzzle is not a straight line but a circuit. You survey the screen, try an item, hit a wall, survey again. Just as the trial-and-error of Baba Is You suits a fine-grained chiptune and the long deliberation of Stephen's Sausage Roll suits silence, the circling of Machinarium suits music that 'keeps swaying in place and never moves forward.' By my ear, roughly BPM 60 to 90 — walking pace. The music never hurries the story; it hangs in the room like air, waiting for the player's thinking to come back around.

And in a game where thought is partitioned room by room, the music also switches scene by scene. Dvořák says he basically wrote a different piece for each scene and avoided easy reuse. When the puzzle's context changes, the sound's context changes too. For the player this works like an unconscious save point: the moment a new track begins, the desk inside your head gets wiped clean. It reminds me of the few seconds of ritual when you flip a record to side B.

Tracks to hear

The full soundtrack streams on Floex's own Bandcamp. Start with Machinarium Soundtrack (official Floex Bandcamp) ↗ and play it through from 'The Bottom' — you descend into the rusty world in the same order as the game's opening. The Bonus EP ↗, collecting five tracks that didn't make the main album, is a free download.

If I had to name one track, it's 'The Castle.' Harpsichord and strings — or so it sounds; in reality it is a mere five or six tracks of MIDI, dirtied with effects into the texture of an old record, as the composer himself reveals. The tidy pizzicato of the first half shatters into granular fragments and collapses into ambience in the second — the 'waking face' and the 'dreaming face' of one melody. On YouTube, the official Floex artist page ↗ leads you to the official audio.

Closing — if you steal anything, steal the ratio and the rust

If I were writing music, here is what I would steal. First, the arithmetic of loops: estimate in advance how many times a piece will repeat, then derive the concreteness of the melody backwards from that count — and if the count is unknowable, crumble the melody like sand. Second, the technique of dirtying: like 'The Castle,' age a clean MIDI arrangement with effects until it becomes 'an old recording.' Carve growth rings into the timbre, and MIDI turns into memory.

For a re-listen: by the window on a rainy day, at the speed at which black coffee goes lukewarm. If the generative ambience of COCOON was the 'keep it playing' solution and Outer Wilds was the 'don't play it' solution, Machinarium is the 'loop it and it still won't rust' solution. Inside the oldest form of all, the loop, this much room for design remains. Next I want to keep thinking about that while listening to Floex's Samorost 3.