Lamplight City Original Soundtrack by Mark Benis Now Available

It’s always a wonderful thing to see artists that made their debut in the video game music community with collaborations and fun album projects graduate to composing full game music soundtracks. Mark Benis, who in the past has collaborated on several fan projects including Materia Collective’s Pokémon Piano Collections and FATE: A Tribute to Majora’s Mask has now seen his first original game soundtrack released in the film noir-inspired video game, Lamplight City.

Lamplight City is a steampunk-ish detective adventure from the creator of A Golden Wake and Shardlight, putting you in control of private investigator Miles Fordham to find justice for his clients and track down his partner’s killer before his entire world comes apart. The music created by Benis is highly immersive, employing little details such as a high piano note for that flickering street light, tremelo and pizzicato strings for the dark alleyways, or an unsettling harp for the unbreakable bond between detectives Miles Fordham and Bill Leger.

“In a cathedral you visit in the game, you encounter the church’s choir director named ‘Singin’ Tom’ who is playing through a piece at the organ. The only problem is he hasn’t been practicing it, a chorale arrangement of ‘Down Among the Dead Men.’ Frankly he’s terrible at it. As the composer I had to figure out a way to create a believably horrible performance so I did it the only way I know how: I played the chorale myself. I stayed up until 2am, took off my glasses, and sight-read it hunched over my MIDI keyboard months after I had first written it. It’s the worst performance that I’ve ever given, but in context maybe it’s my best? On the album you hear the piece after Singin’ Tom practices quite a bit, but in the game… get your ears ready.” – Mark Benis, Composer

The 41-track soundtrack for Lamplight City is currently available on multiple platforms including Bandcamp,  iTunes and Spotify.