Soundtrack: Genesis Noir — a universe built from improvisation, sounding when you touch it

Introduction — the trigger is pulled, and time stops

A black-and-white street corner. As the watch salesman No Man hurries toward his lover, Miss Mass, a gunshot sounds. A single round from a jealous god — and that is this universe's Big Bang. The bullet drifts forward at almost-eternal slowness while No Man dives into the expanding stretch of time, searching for a way to save her. In this point-and-click adventure by Feral Cat Den (Komugi's review), the universe is voiced by the London duo Skillbard — Tom Carrell and Vincent Oliver.

The first thing that reaches your ear is jazz you could almost smell cigarettes on: brush-stroked drums, a wide-striding upright bass, a muted trumpet. Roughly a medium tempo, the pulse loose, the spaces generous. Out of habit I started to count the BPM, but this music dislikes being counted. A phrase that could be playing in a noir film's bar is carried, unbroken, all the way to the edge of the cosmos — that is the distance it opens with.

Behind the making — bolting improvisation together like puzzle pieces

Carrell and Oliver spent roughly four years on this, refining some 227 musical cues one at a time. A live jazz band, an orchestra, a small choir, a handful of soloists. Recording was carried out over low-latency links with players scattered from Budapest to London. Their ideal, they say, was 'a live group playing together in the same room without a click-track.' Under the pandemic that wasn't possible, and what remained as the glue was improvisation.

Their own description sticks with me. Players were handed only a base, and the solos that emerged in the studio were 'bolted, later, like puzzle pieces onto the next part.' Rather than designing the virtuosity up front, they gathered the wobble of live improvisation and assembled it. One technical highlight, the technicolor set piece 'Tetrachromacy,' reportedly took 'a full month, full-time, with so many revisions' precisely because of this method. The music built this way took both Excellence in Audio and Excellence in Visual Art at the 2021 IGF.

The hidden link to play — timbre narrates a universe without words

Genesis Noir has not one line of dialogue. Across a journey of several hours, almost only music and sound effects carry the story. So Skillbard refused to cling to a single style and dressed each layer of the cosmos in a different genre: bebop, spiritual jazz, exotica, world fusion, big band, and electronica. Each time the era or place changes, the timbre swaps out, and that difference itself tells you 'where you are now.' In place of words, timbre does the narrating.

And at the story's center sits 'Miss Mass Theme,' named for the lover. Every time this theme rises, we remember that what the Big Bang threatens is not cosmology but a single love. A god's jealousy, the drawn-out gunshot, expanding time — the music keeps pulling that grand premise back to the story of the distance between two people. It anchors an abstract cosmic tale with a melody that has body heat. That, I heard, is this game's greatest device for carrying emotion without dialogue.

The puzzle analogy — the hand turning a knob, and the breath of improvisation

Genesis Noir's puzzles aren't the kind where you glare at a grid for the shortest move. They're tactile play — turn a knob, touch a thing, try 'what happens' — a no-fail design where you almost never get stuck. The player's hand is less like calculating an answer and more like an improviser testing the keys: touch, listen to the reaction, feel for the next move. Loose-pulsed jazz sits perfectly beside that probing tempo. A strict grid-logic puzzle would want silence; here, breathing jazz is the right companion.

What's striking is the relationship between having no failure state and the music. Many puzzle games keep a cue that sounds 'wrong'; Genesis Noir barely needs one. So the music can flow like a live set, never bracing for a mistake. The music the players 'bolted together' from solos and the experience the player 'tries and continues' move on the same improviser's breath. Making and playing are tied by one rhythm — and there, I think, is the heart of this soundtrack.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with the story's theme, 'Miss Mass Theme.' It carries the 'single love' the Big Bang threatens; muted horn and bass lean slowly against each other. Here is the emotional center of gravity of Genesis Noir.

Next, the technicolor set piece 'Tetrachromacy' that took a full month. Written for a scene flooding with color, it shows the density of bolted-together improvisation at its strongest. Heard in full, you can feel how the genres swap yet stay tied into one continuous universe.

All 28 tracks are gathered on Skillbard's official Bandcamp as "Big Bang: Music from the Universe of Genesis Noir" ↗. The album version also holds vocals, solos, and surprises not in the game.

Closing — what I'd steal if I were writing it

I take two things home. One: match the making to the game's verb. Genesis Noir's verb is 'try, touch, improvise,' and the music, too, was made by bolting improvisation together. When I write, I've started asking whether the compositional method itself can lean toward the hand the work invites — probing, ticking, or waiting. Two: when there are no words, let timbre speak. Change ensemble and genre per layer, and make the difference itself the information. It's an idea that works for any long, chaptered piece, not only games.

If you want more music designed without dialogue, set it beside INSIDE, which speaks through sound run past a skull; if you want the feel of live jazz lighting up a city, line up Contrast and The Pedestrian. A universe built from improvisation is best re-run from the top on a night long enough for black coffee to go cold.