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Soundtrack: Telling Lies — one-sided music, playable in any order
Sam Barlow's Telling Lies is an investigation puzzle where you search someone else's video archive and stitch the fragments together. Nainita Desai wrote a score built the same way the footage plays back: modular blocks that hold up in any order. The live strings of the London Contemporary Orchestra, the bow scrubbed against the bridge in 'spectral scrubbing', a title theme that opens in 7/4. Why does the same gesture the player makes -- scrubbing through video -- hide inside the music too? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: Botany Manor — Music that keeps no clock
In Botany Manor you coax long-forgotten plants back into bloom inside a retired botanist's estate. Thomas Williams' score is small-ensemble chamber music built around close-recorded violin and harp, and each forgotten plant carries its own theme. Why does this unhurried music sit so well against a puzzle with no timer and no failure? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Heaven's Vault — a small chord waiting for every moment of discovery
In inkle's narrative adventure, archaeologist Aliya and her robot companion Six sail the rivers of a nebula in search of a missing scholar — and at its core sits a puzzle of deciphering an ancient script. Laurence Chapman scored it, and beneath the intimacy of a string quartet he hid some twenty short pieces written only for 'moments of discovery.' How the deciphering puzzle meshes with those small chords — black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: Manifold Garden — Music that returns even when you fall
Choose your gravity, fall to the bottom, and you return from the ceiling: an endless architecture. The music Laryssa Okada wrote for it is built from strings and pads that never resolve, shaped much like the looping space itself. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music loops yet never sounds like mere repetition, through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
