Wilbert Roget handcrafted the sinister soundtrack of Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods

BAFTA winner and GRAMMY nominee Wilbert Roget II returns to the spooky forests of the Pacific Northwest with his latest soundtrack album for Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods.

The 7-track OST is now streaming and downloadable on music services including Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and more.

How did you go about composing this second soundtrack for Pacific Drive?

Wilbert: "When scoring games, I like to take influence from the art direction and colour scheme – it gives me a useful impression of the overall vibe of the world and setting. While the base game had a wide variety of green and brown forest colours, Whispers in the Woods featured lots of violent reds, reflecting the cult itself. So my first step was to design as many sounds as I could that gave a grimy and aggressively red impression – for instance, using distorted pads and crackly sound sources reminiscent of large roaring fires."

How did you arrive at the sound of a cult?

Wilbert: "The cult itself is made up of scientists who’ve become obsessed with the Zone and concepts of evolution, and so I wrote “The Harmonic Fellowship” with hymn-like lyrics that reflected their beliefs. I wrote the lyrics in Esperanto as I figured the cultists would support this constructed international language as a world-unifying evolution.

"Several years ago, I attended a Six Nations rugby game in Cardiff, which began with the entire stadium full of over 50,000 spectators powerfully singing the Welsh national anthem. I recorded this on my phone, and years later I edited and time-stretched individual notes from the recording to create synthesized pad sounds. The result can be heard most noticeably in the track “The Steward’s Rites”, where the choral pad again represents the cultists."

How important a role does reverb and similar processing effects play in creating the atmosphere of Pacific Drive and Whispers in the Woods?

Wilbert: "I handcraft every sound in Pacific Drive’s musical score from scratch, often from simple phone recordings of evocative sounds I randomly discover out in the real world. So I use lots of reverbs, distortions, time-stretching and granular synthesis to turn these low-fi recordings into usable instruments.

Pacific Drive’s base game score featured lots of large metallic clangs, representing the junkyard and vehicle concepts. I wanted the percussion in Whispers in the Woods to be even more contorted and terrifying, and so I recorded all my metallic percussion sounds to cassette tape using an old Tascam Portastudio. I discovered that if I play the tape while slightly holding the Stop button, it inexplicably plays back at double-speed with a strange warbling effect – so I recorded the percussion to tape at half-speed, then re-sampled it back with this double-speed technique, sending some of the signal through my Moog MFDrive pedal as well for more powerful bass. The result was a meaner, more distant and defiled tone that perfectly fit the aesthetic I was trying to establish."

Do you do anything in your studio to create the atmosphere of Pacific Drive when creating the score? 

Wilbert: "One of the joys of writing for Pacific Drive is that the game takes place right here in the Pacific Northwest; all I need to do is look out the window at our incessantly grey skies for inspiration!

Jokes aside, I like to change my PC’s desktop background to a screenshot or key art from whatever project I’m currently scoring, to help immerse my imagination into the world. I do have deep blue black-out curtains throughout my entire studio, but they’re mostly for soundproofing and to help me maintain my bizarre nocturnal sleep schedule.

It seems like, with Pacific Drive and survival games in general, players conduct their own horror experience, to some extent. Does that necessitate that the score be more restrained and spacious?

Wilbert: "Absolutely! One of the first decisions I made in terms of interactive music was that we should use silence as the norm, with music coming in only sporadically rather than being composed as constantly-playing loops.

"A surprising discovery I also made early on, was that the harmonies needed to be greatly restrained as well. The first biome especially, with the damp green forests, only seemed to work when my music used just two chords, D minor and A minor – anything more, and the music felt like it was imposing upon the game world instead of naturally emanating from it."

What are the challenges in composing for a game that is in some ways more about atmosphere than characters? 

Wilbert: "From my perspective as the composer, the biomes of Pacific Drive are characters in and of themselves! Each of them has an emotion and a history, both as pieces of nature and as a record of the expansion of the Zone. The major difference is that music is far more subtle in Pacific Drive, composed with a minimalist boutique sound palette instead of a large symphonic orchestra, and with subtle hints melody rather than an overtly thematic focus.

"After several years working on games with gargantuan and intimidating orchestral scores, it was a pleasure to take a step back and develop a more personal aesthetic for Pacific Drive!"

Wilbert Roget II is an award-winning video game composer with credits including Mortal Kombat 11, Call of Duty: WWII, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Helldivers 2, Star Wars Outlaws, and many more – www.rogetmusic.com