Forces – Sigil

Forces – Sigil
demo album

’Sigil’ is a homage and/or an alternative soundtrack to a 1999 computer roleplaying game ’Planescape: Torment’. The game was developed by the Black Isle Studios, a team of developers perhaps better known to be behind the original Fallout games. It is also a homage to the game’s evocative soundtrack by Mark Morgan, who made the Fallout OST’s as well.

Planescape: Torment is based on the Planescape campaign of Dungeons & Dragons RPG. The game takes place in a city called Sigil, which is located at the crossroads of the ”planes”, the different layers of existence. Each plane is its own universe with rules regarding gravity, geography, magic and morality. Sigil is referred to as a ”city of doors” as it has portals to all these different realities.

Playing it as a teenager in 2000 was a pivotal experience for me. I already had some experience with CRPG’s (Fallouts, Baldur’s Gates…), but perhaps it is the complex setting of Planescape that makes it so memorable. You play as an amnesiac immortal ”The Nameless One” searching for your lost memories and the reason why you are immortal. The liminality of Sigil makes it feel that everything is possible and you really have no idea what will be the emerging plot of the game.

I wanted to make an album, which would convey this feeling of boundarylessness – a slipstream experience with baroque-like audative richness, uncanny field recordings and shifting textures. Simple ambient synth melodies combined with very busy sound design and all kinds of computer music techniques were used to make an album, which is maybe at the same time peaceful and a bit unsettling. Maybe you could also describe it as traditional folk music of some parallel dimension.

To emphasize the narrative nature of the piece, I hired a voice actor Rupert Wycliffe-Taylor to deliver key lines from the game to help in the word-building aspect. Almost all the lines are describing the Planescape setting, how the planes are constituted and the nature of them.