Christopher Larkin: Breathing Life Into a Ruined World

     Christopher Larkin was born in Adelaide, South Australia and began composing music for his own video games at age 13. His dad, a music teacher, taught him piano and musical improvisation at the same time he was learning about technology. He went on to study music composition at the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide, during which he took a gig writing music for a short film being developed by some filmmaking students there. After university he learned about the Kickstarter campaign started by the Adelaide-based game development team Team Cherry to create Hollow Knight, a 2-D sidescrolling action-adventure game set in a ruined, bug-filled kingdom. Larkin knew the team's director Ari Gibson from earlier projects and sent him a demo of his work. The team seemed to have liked what they heard, because Larkin was taken on as the lead composer and sound designer for Hollow Knight as well as its sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong. 

Christopher Larkin

     When writing Hollow Knight's soundtrack, Larkin was told that the music should evoke "melancholy and dark elegance". He also took inspiration from other visual media composers like Studio Ghibli's Joe Hisashi and Nintendo's Koji Kondo, as well as the French Impressionist composer Debussy. The overall soundtrack has a strong emphasis on soft piano and viola but different instruments and sounds are utilized in different areas, like harp and marimba for the forested Greenpath, organ for the more academic Soul Sanctum, and echoing sounds of people moving about in the once-bustling Queen's Station. Larkin also drew from real-world classical music, as is the case with the boss theme "Mantis Lords" which resembles the swiftness and precision of Vivaldi and other baroque composers. Lastly, the entire soundtrack contains a number of leitmotifs, or short recurring musical phrases, that correspond to different places and characters across the game. 

"Mantis Lords"

"City of Tears"

       As of now Silksong is barely over a month old, so any interviews Larking has done on his work on its soundtrack are either in progress of nonexistent. However, as someone who has played (and obsessively listened to the music of) Hollow Knight and is currently enjoying Silksong I couldn't resist talking about how it compares and contrasts to the first game. Silksong is still distinctly Larkin's work but is on a much grander scale than its predecessor, partially thanks to the addition of a choir to pieces designated for areas in the world rather being reserved solely for major bosses. The music performs a similar job of adding mood and emotion to the world; Hollow Knight's "City of Tears" conveys the atmosphere of a quiet, rainy city in the same way that Silksong's "Bone Bottom" creates a feeling of loneliness but also anticipation of the journey to come. It also does excellent work in characterizing the various bosses encountered along the way, such as Widow's madness, the Cogwork Dancers' precise elegance, and Trobbio's dramatic flair. 

"Bone Bottom"

"Widow"

    In Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura describes beauty as "food for the soul", "a pleasure to the mind", and "a refreshment for the spirit". I have absolutely experienced that pleasure and refreshment while listening to Larkin's soundtrack both while playing the game and outside of it, but I think there's more to it than that. In both Hollow Knight and Silksong, the player explores lands brought to ruin, interacts with their inhabitants, and pieces together what happened to these once-great civilizations. Larkin's soundtracks imbue these places with life, emotion, and memory that contrasts sharply with the game's intense difficulty (just ask anyone who's managed to get through Hollow Knight's White Palace and Silksong's Bilewater). Despite the environment's best attempts to push you out, the music encourages the player to keep moving forward in search of new secrets. It makes the journey one to remember and means that you'll want to keep listening even after you've closed the game. 

"White Palace"