Name: Season: A Letter To The Future (Original Soundtrack)
Brand: Spencer Doran

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

RVNGNL106LP

Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2023-11-03

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0747742385780

Total Cap

Black LPx2

Artist

Spencer Doran

Genre GB

Soundtracks

Label GB

Rvng Intl

RVNG Intl. is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 2003 by [founder's name], the label has gained recognition for its unique and diverse roster of artists. In January 2014, RVNG Intl. was selected as Resident Advisor's label of the month, solidifying its reputation as a leading force in the music industry. Additionally, Tiny Mix Tapes named RVNG Intl. among their favorite labels of 2015.
With a commitment to pushing boundaries and showcasing innovative sounds, RVNG Intl. has become known for releasing groundbreaking music across various genres including electronic, experimental, and ambient. The label prides itself on fostering creativity and supporting emerging artists who challenge conventional norms.
RVNG Intl.'s catalog features an impressive array of critically acclaimed releases that have garnered attention from both fans and critics alike. With a focus on quality over quantity, each release is carefully curated to offer listeners a truly immersive musical experience.

Soundtracks | Vinyl LPs, CDs, Merch | Rough Trade

Newest Listed Items

Composed and produced over the course of nearly three years, Spencer Doran’s original soundtrack for Season: A Letter to the Future underpins the highly-anticipated meditative exploration game in which the main character must save memories of a civilization on the verge of collapse. A lush collection of transmissions from this warmly fading world, we hear a culture and ecology through the sentimental ear of their last witness.

Doran was an early collaborator in the making of Season, helping define the game’s imaginary world and emotional tones. His past work in music has taken many forms including site-specific audio installations, compiling the acclaimed Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental and New Age Music 1980-1990, and his own humanely futuristic work as half of Visible Cloaks. Each pursuit found relevance within the soundtrack of a video game that takes place in an invented culture living out its final days.

Season is about what it feels like to be alive in a certain time and place, and to capture that feeling for the future. The protagonist of the story, Estelle, is a photographer and sound recordist, working with her microphone, camera, and journal to uncover the complexity of an environment facing erasure. This documentation is not mere salvage anthropology, but a key to understanding Estelle’s own past, and also a meditation on our present.

Sound and music factor heavily into the interactive and narrative aspects of Season; the character is equipped with a free-form audio recorder used to capture and playback any sound heard in the game and trigger revelations about the world around her. These sounds are at times musical, and we hear them interwoven with Doran’s score throughout the soundtrack: an organ played by mountain air, a ratchety mechanical music box echoing out communal “sleep music” for a village, an aeolian harp played by gusts of valley wind, imagined exotica cranked from the hi-fi of an old monk.

Rather than simply composing songs and placing them into a 3D context, Doran worked with Season’s audio team to arrange the soundtrack for an abstract and evolving experience within Audiokinetic’s Wwise, a software designed for managing complex systems of audio for gaming platforms. Within Season, the environmental music uses what Doran refers to as a “Venn Diagram model” for tonal layering, where “different modular layers of various pieces are dispersed across wide areas and overlap with each other as you traverse the landscape, with randomized elements creating continuously different combinations”.

The score functions as “musical wind” – sound fragments that drift and swirl around with the same behavior as the acoustic biome of the landscape. As a composer writes for each instrument in an orchestra, Doran writes with the voices of landscapes, gusts of wind, esoteric imagined instruments, and drifting radio broadcasts. The music renders an unplaceable specificity of feeling, like German Fernweh or “far sickness”: a homesickness for somewhere you’ve never been before. We can hear the influence of early 20th century impressionism, Ravel, Satie, Debussy, Déodat de Séverac, particularly in the piano pieces. Elsewhere, other historical instruments are heard: viol, harp, flute, portable organ (petite orgue), celesta - all within the crisp hyper-real space Doran is known for exploring in Visible Cloaks.  

Boundaries are blurred between the natural world and the non-diegetic score, functioning not as a superimposition on the sound world but rather an extension of it, drawing from composers that worked adjacent to the field of acoustic ecology like Hildegard Westerkamp and R. Murray Schafer, as well as research by Steven Feld and José Maceda about, according to Doran, “the mirrored reflections of the natural world heard within traditional music forms.”  

Condensing these rich, changing networks of sound into a traditional soundtrack release presented a challenge to Doran, but this is music to live in and explore, regardless of the format it is expressed. The songs seep into your bones. You may notice with some concern that they, in fact, were already there.  

Season: A Letter To The Future (Original Soundtrack) 

Music GB

Discover Season: A Letter To The Future (Original Soundtrack) by Spencer Doran. A lush collection of transmissions from a fading world, capturing the feeling of being alive in a certain time and place. Available in various formats. Label: Rvng Intl.