Soundtrack: IMMORTALITY — recording a theme together with its dark underside

Introduction — orchestral half-light rising from a score with no picture

A vanished actor, Marissa Marcel, left behind three films that were never released. You reel in their fragments by clicking a face or an object inside the frame and jumping to another scene. In this live-action (FMV) mystery IMMORTALITY, which Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is neither CGI nor chiptune but the half-light of a real orchestra. Low strings breathe in slowly; a woodwind draws a thin line across them. The tempo is very slow — by my ear, somewhere around 60 to 80 BPM, a touch calmer than a pulse.

The composer is Nainita Desai, a twice Emmy-nominated British composer of film, television and game music; the soundtrack came out on Lakeshore Records in August 2022 across 17 tracks (distributed via The Orchard). Her situation on this score was unusual. The visual clues a composer usually receives — gameplay footage, artwork, a rough cut of the film — were absent, and what she was handed was a single 280-page script. This music, in other words, was raised from words and conversation before it was ever pinned to a picture.

Three films, three themes — music assigned to structure, not to time

Desai threw out the idea of underscore that traces scenes linearly. In a game that shows 8 to 10 hours of live-action material non-linearly, writing along the picture makes no sense. Instead she wrote one theme per film. 'Religion' for a 1968 Gothic film (based on the novel The Monk, dealing with life after death); 'Life' for a 1970s New York thriller about the death of an artist; 'Art' for a late-'90s story of a pop star and her body double. She kept a single orchestral palette but tied each theme to an abstract idea — religion, life, art — precisely, she says in interview, to avoid writing pastiche of each period's scores.

Here is the puzzle-like part. Which theme sounds is decided not by the playback position but by the metadata (tags) attached to the scene you are on. Every time the player clicks from fragment to fragment, the music is re-selected according to a state — which film, and what kind of scene — rather than a timeline. The score is designed as a state machine, not a single line. This is also why the composer could write it without ever seeing the picture: what she prepared was not music for specific scenes but a stock of material meant to stick to states.

The subverted theme, the supernatural theme — twin shadows born from one recording

Each theme carries two kinds of shadow. One is the 'subverted' version: for religion, control and cruelty; for life, the morning after with a hangover; for art, the drudgery of never reaching completion — the negative face of the same melody. The other is the 'supernatural' version, which Desai likens to the Upside Down of Stranger Things. It runs in parallel with the surface theme, and the moment you hit upon a certain something, the sound you hear flips, warps, and switches into something eerie. She and Barlow lean hard on David Lynch here — the evil that lies one skin beneath the perfect American dream.

The making of it was, for me, the biggest lesson. She built this supernatural version not by swapping in new uncanny instruments but by chopping up the original recording of the surface theme itself. At regular, quite mathematical intervals she cuts in, stretches, removes bars, and maps the cut sections 1:1 onto the theme. Granular synthesis, delays, reverbs, pitch-shifting. In this way it keeps the bloodline of 'a badly warped version of the same theme' while becoming a sound that makes you think 'something is not right.' That surface and underside are not separate materials but twins born of one recording — this is what answers, in sound, that moment of discovery when you scrub the footage and dig up a hidden layer.

The analogy with puzzles — the rewinding finger and chords chosen by state

I am the type who always wants to measure music in BPM, but this work refuses that. The tempo at which you 'solve' IMMORTALITY is not a linear speed. You leap from scene to scene by clicking, and peer behind the footage by rewinding — the very way you advance is non-linear, back and forth. So this score, too, is built not as a band flowing at a fixed beat but as a mechanism that re-selects the sounding chord according to your hand — which scene, which quality you are touching now. The tempo of solving and the tempo of the music are written in the same grammar of state transitions.

By my reading, if you set the surface theme as 'the feeling of solving,' the subverted version as 'the texture of being stuck,' and the supernatural version as 'the moment you touch what you shouldn't,' these three layers become the three phases of the player's mind. When you rewind and rub the same scene again and again, your ear catches the inverted twin. If silence suits long thought (Stephen's Sausage Roll) and chiptune suits trial and error (Baba Is You), then the discovery of reeling in fragments non-linearly is best suited by the shadow of an orchestra that switches by state.

Tracks worth hearing

First, 'Immortality - Opening,' embedded above: the surface theme rising in clear half-light, before it shows any shadow (Nainita Desai official topic channel, provided via The Orchard).

Then 'Life,' the second theme tied to Minsky, where the saxophone Desai says she had long wanted to use lays a cold emptiness beneath the sensual surface — she herself cites the air of Klute and Body Double. Nainita Desai - Life (Lakeshore Records official) ↗

The full album can be reached across services from the official smart link. Immortality (Original Soundtrack) official links ↗

In closing — carving a theme's shadow from the same take

If I were writing music, this is what I'd steal. Once you've written a theme, don't prepare its 'underside' separately in a new timbre — chop, stretch, and carve the shadow out of the recording of the theme itself. Keep surface and underside as blood relatives, and the listener will intuit, at the moment of the switch, that 'the same thing has warped.' Then hand which version sounds not to the playback position but to a state — the scene's tags, the player's progress. Choosing sound by state rather than by line: this move, which only works in interactive work, is worth remembering.

If you relisten, do it late at night, after brewing a cup of black coffee. Put on the clear theme of 'Opening' first, then dive into its supernatural version, and the design of the moment the same melody turns inside out becomes clear. Extend your reach to Barlow's non-linear storytelling (Her Story, Telling Lies) and to Desai's documentary work (For Sama), and the craft of this music 'raised from words' should come into fuller relief.