SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-20
Soundtrack: Braid, Anniversary Edition — only the sounds that survive being reversed
Jami Sieber, Shira Kammen, Cheryl Ann Fulton (remix: Martin Stig Andersen)
Introduction — a river without a beat
The first thing you hear on the title screen is a cello. Before Tim takes a single step, one low, clear string draws a slow arc. Out of habit I tried to clock the BPM; the needle wouldn't settle. There is a pulse somewhere around 60, but the tempo is rubato throughout, never bound to a meter. Cello, harp, fiddle, living strings carry it; percussion barely appears. It is soft-edged music, like a river.
This sound was prepared for the time-rewinding puzzle platformer covered in Komugi's review. But it was not composed for it. Jonathan Blow hired no in-house composer; instead he chose and licensed already-released pieces by Magnatune artists Jami Sieber, Shira Kammen, and Cheryl Ann Fulton, and laid them out as a soundtrack. Around eight tracks, born in entirely different contexts, were re-placed behind a puzzle game.
The condition for selection — it must be beautiful in reverse
Here is the most interesting thing about Braid's music. When Blow chose the pieces, his criterion was the game's core mechanic — rewinding time. What he described in his GDC 2010 talk and interviews of the era comes down to this: the sound had to remain interesting when played backwards. Rewound, the texture of the instruments should run in reverse without breaking, and ideally show a different face. That peculiar smear of Sieber's cello and Kammen's strings flowing backwards through a filter was intended at the selection stage, not added later.
Had he laid down sharp-attack percussion or synth sequences, rewinding would have sounded like nothing but tape scrubbing. Slow-decay strings and harp, reversed, stretch their onsets and bring the reverb to the front. Blow choosing pulse-free, sustained music was an aesthetic decision and a functional one at once. Every time the player bends time, the music rewinds with it as a reversible material. Mechanic and timbre shake hands at the layer of selection, not editing.
The Anniversary Edition — LIMBO's shadow falls
For the 2024 Anniversary Edition, the audio was remade. The remix and remaster were handled by Martin Stig Andersen and Hans Christian Koch. If the name rings a bell, he is the acousmatic-trained composer I took apart in my LIMBO piece; the water and metal of INSIDE are his too. For Braid he wrote seven new electroacoustic remixes from scratch.
Andersen's versions keep the temperature of the original strings while folding in a darker, grainier texture to match the tense later stages — as if another mineral had sunk into the calm river. What strikes me is that Braid's starting point, sound that is beautiful in reverse, and Andersen's aesthetic of distorting a sound's 'identity' to erase its origin, were continuous from the start. Reversibility and anonymity come from a similar place. With original and remix sharing one disc, Braid's audio became a double layer of 'chosen music' and 'written sound design'.
The analogy with puzzles — the solution travels back and forth in time
Braid's puzzles cannot be solved by moving forward alone. Take a key, carry it to the door, rewind when you err, sync with a shadow, advance again. Thinking is not a straight line but a round trip up and down the time axis. Put a four-on-the-floor beat under that and the round trip starts to sound like 'lateness'. Whether you stand still, advance, or rewind, the music had to receive you with the same expression.
So pulse-free, seamlessly looping sustained music is the right answer. The way I read it, Braid's music is not a clock but a water level. However long you think, the level only rises and falls quietly; it never rushes you. And only at the instant you rewind does the water run backwards, quietly returning to you the awareness that you are bending time. It is the opposite solution to Stephen's Sausage Roll, which set silence against long deliberation — here long thought is held not by silence but by reversible sustain. Both 'never rush you', by different means.
Tracks worth hearing
The official compilation 'Music from Braid' is up on YouTube (an auto-generated album, each track marked 'Provided to YouTube by'). First, just soak in the river end to end.
Above all, Jami Sieber's 'Maenam' and 'Undercurrent'. The former is a cello piece inspired by a river and elephants in Thailand; its slow back-and-forth bowing meshes strangely well with rewinding. The latter also exists in a Jon Schatz remix consciously shaped around time travel. The whole album is at Music from Braid (official playlist) ↗.
Closing — if I were the one making it
What I steal from Braid's sound is the idea of placing reversibility as a constraint before you make anything, not as a post-production effect. Building sound that survives rewinding after the fact is hard. But write three conditions into the blueprint from the start — slow-decay timbres, pulse-free structure, seamless loops — and the music will withstand any game heavy with retries and undos. What Blow did was not composing but selecting existing pieces under those conditions; and if the conditions are right, curation is a kind of composition.
If you revisit it, pick a night when you wish you could rewind one of your own day's choices. Alternate Andersen's shadowed remixes with Sieber's originals and the same river shows a different color by day and by night. Next, head to the LIMBO piece, where I took apart Andersen too. Reversible sound and sound stripped of its identity run, somewhere, along the same vein of water.
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