Sacred Music in the Circuits: spiritual and religious music in videogames
A mix and mini-essay about my own experiences finding the divine in the digital, listen back on NTS Radio now
tldr; I did a guest mix for NTS Radio’s one-off “Songs of Praise” series this week, which is up to listen back now. If you want to skip my long preamble and dive straight in, you can listen to the mix here now, and I have the full tracklisting at the end of this post.
As you might expect for a kid who grew up in the 90s, I spent a lot more time playing videogames than I ever spent going to church.
We did have our bi-annual family church trip for Xmas and Easter, mostly just to reassure my (much more religious) grandparents that we weren’t all going to hell, and we sung christian hymns at our supposedly secular primary school, but outside of that, videogames would have been my first real encounter with sacred music and spirituality.
Not that I would have been fully aware of it at the time - I didn’t really have the vocabulary for the feeling back then, and I certainly wouldn’t have realised that, for example, “Ceremony” from the excellent Secret of Mana soundtrack was inspired by gamelan until much later in life. At the time, I just enjoyed it as a cool piece of music that fit the scene in a way I couldn’t describe. But these experiences certainly had a significant impact on me - one that’s kept bringing me back to those games and soundtracks, and for more than just pure nostalgia.
It’s interesting to me that these “sacred spaces” where I had very real ecstatic, emotional experiences don’t actually exist at all - they were purely virtual, just data encoded on a chip. This is of course just one example in a long history of humans accessing the divine outside of purpose-built man-made spaces. Ancient cultures have venerated the natural world as a sacred site for literally thousands of years (largely outlawed / colonized / wiped out / paved over by the Christian church, or other major world religions who wanted to formalise systems of power and control). Alternate forms of perception have also long been a part of spiritual practice. My experiences with videogames though highlighted (at least for myself) how personal and specific feelings of spirituality can be - a church, like a forest, can be a sacred site, but it can also be a site of trauma.
Music is obviously incredibly important in creating an atmosphere of the “sacred” too - the way a choir resonates inside a cathedral, or the inescapable drive of ceremonial rhythm music. There’s an interesting link between a lot of non-western sacred traditions and videogame music too - things like Gnawa or Gamelan are deliberately not meant to be “front and centre” (like a piece of music you sit down and watch/listen) but happening concurrently for hours alongside a ceremony or celebration, often to help facilitate the ecstatic experience. Like with videogames, the music might be playing for hours, and the point is that it’s enhancing the experience but also not drawing you out of it or calling attention to itself, unless that’s the intention in a particular moment.
Many of my own experiences with sacred spaces in videogames are indelibly tied to the music too, inseparable from the scene and what is happening. It’d been more than 20 years since my first playthrough of Final Fantasy 7, and yet I could still remember the “Flowers in the Church” melody like it was yesterday, and the beauty and light of that small run-down chapel in the Midgar Slums, a real feeling of calm amidst the storm.
The idea for Sacred Music from Inside the Circuits began with a desire to dig deeper into the use of sacred music in videogames - not just the soundtracks I remember from my youth, but also games and music I’d either missed the first time around, or that was released in the intervening years (a special shout out here to friends Connor Belshaw, James Wright, Mike Boyd and Joe Caithness, who all suggested things I should check out for this). This is also music that heavily informed my own first forays into production in the last couple of years, and even my artist name “Temple” (there’s even a VIP from me in the mix, technically the first ever solo track I’ve put out into the ether..!).
The mix compiles pieces from classic series like Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, Fatal Frame and Castlevania, but also plenty of new(er) bits, including Jessica Curry’s incredible soundtrack for Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, and music from That Dragon Cancer.
As a side note, I found it surprisingly difficult to find examples of certain types of spiritual music in videogames, in particular Indian raga, which is largely absent from this mix. Sure, there are plenty of examples of extremely appropriate-y middle eastern and Indian music made by white western composers, but a lot of that felt too orientalist and kitschy to include here. Thanks to a tip-off from a friend who works in gaming, I did manage to stumble across Indian indie developer Studio Oleomingus, and through them the music of their sometimes-in-house composer Salil Bhayani, but outside of that I found less than I’d like to. Please hit me up with recommendations - maybe I’ll do a pt 2 at some point…
Listen to the mix here, and full tracklist below. Listen to the other shows from NTS’ Song of Praise series here.
Sacred Music from Inside the Circuits - tracklist:
Masato Ohashi - Wind Temple Ascent [The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom OST]
Koji Kondo - Forest Temple [The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time OST]
Motoi Sakuraba - A Sanctuary [Tales of Destiny OST]
Nobuo Uematsu - Flowers in the Church [Final Fantasy VII OST]
Akira Yamaoka - Heaven Give Me Say [Silent Hill OST]
Masami Ueda - The Curse [Okami OST]
Tsukiko Amano - Osaka Family Altar [Fatal Frame 2 OST]
Hiroki Kikuta - Ceremony [Secret of Mana OST]
Jon Hill - Exsurge Domine, Salvum Me [That Dragon Cancer OST]
Michael Ghelfi - Ice Temple
Russell Shaw - Gregorian [Black & White OST]
Guillaume David - Children of the Omnissiah [Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus OST]
Christopher Larkin - Soul Sanctum [Hollow Knight OST]
Keiichi Okabe - Shadowlord Theme [Nier Replicant OST]
Falcom Sound Team - Shrine of Eidos [Trails in the Sky soundtrack OST]
Tsukiko Amano - Dirt Hallway [Fatal Frame 2 OST]
Koji Kondo - Spirit Temple [The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time OST]
Salil Bhayani - Under a Porcelain Sun [trailer music]
Nobuo Uematsu - The Extraction [Final Fantasy IX OST]
Jessica Curry - For Ever [Everybody's Gone To The Rapture OST]
Kow Otani - Resurrection [Shadow of the Colossus OST]
Michiru Yamane - Requiem of the Gods [Castlevania: Symphony of the Night OST]
Tsukiko Amano - Kurosawa Family Altar [Fatal Frame 2 OST]
Nobuo Uematsu - Master of Time [Final Fantasy IX OST]
Nobuo Uematsu - Temple of the Ancients [Final Fantasy VII OST]
Temple - Water Temple [VIP]
Manaka Kataoka, Maasa Miyoshi, Masato Ohashi, Tsukasa Usui - Shrine Theme [The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom OST]
Spencer Doran - Ascending to the Shrine [SEASON: A Letter to the Future OST]
Koji Kondo - Temple of Time [The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time OST]