Lakeshore Records releases Eldest Souls—Original Game Soundtrack featuring the score debut by London-based, Spanish & Italian composer and sound designer Sergio Ronchetti. The darkly melancholic orchestrated score is redolent of both Ronchetti’s classical training as well as his love of all things metal from his days touring as a heavy metal bassist. It’s a dramatic, combative musical backdrop to the envelope-pushing pixel art, boss rush, “Souls-like” video game. Developed by Fallen Flag Studio, Eldest Souls was released via publishers, United Label, on July 29.
Explaining his approach to scoring the game, Ronchetti said, “Eldest Souls has two very distinct messages that needed conveying: the brutal, fast-paced combat and the ideas of loneliness and hope. The former was represented by each boss fight’s theme, matching personality and attitude. But since the game-play music is limited to these combat encounters, I wanted to write a piece of music to tie the soundtrack together and give the perspective of mankind and our protagonist.”
Ronchetti created the Eldest Souls “Main Theme” track to counterbalance his more aggressive boss encounter tracks: “The ‘Main Theme’ stands out from all the rest. I love post-minimalism ideals in music and I was very happy to be able to achieve this with live vocals and cello, which made all the difference. The repeating vocal melody serves as mankind’s unfaltering, yet desperate pursuit of victory, in the face of destruction.”
Following centuries of servitude, Man finally rebelled against the Old Gods, imprisoning these colossal calamities within the sacred walls of the Citadel. But an evil stirred within… In a final act of vengeance, the Old Gods have unleashed a great Desolation upon the world. Mankind is fading, with but a glimmer of hope remaining. Heavy is the burden that lies on one lone Warrior. Armed with a great sword… of the purest Obsydian.
London-based, Spanish & Italian composer and sound designer Sergio Ronchetti boldly crafts scores dwelling within realms of dusky depth, mercurial mood, and aggressive execution, drawing upon his background in heavy metal and combining his lyrical tastes with more traditional, orchestral compositional techniques for a truly singular signature style.
Sergio’s debut score for the 2021 pixel-art, boss-rush, “Souls-like” video game Eldest Souls captures the lonely and desolate melancholy of the game world while also providing vigorous, combative battle music matching the intensity of the challenging gameplay and capturing the personality and essence of each iconic boss fight. He cites artists like Trivium, Machine Head, and Gojira as direct references to his Eldest Souls score - even if his instrumentation's are far removed from theirs.
The up-and-coming creative’s music path began in high school where he spent his lunch breaks jamming Metallica songs with friends and trying to recreate Cliff Burton solos with cheap distortion pedals and cheesy power stances.
With no formal musical education, Sergio decided he wanted to become a rock star instead of going to university and joined a metal band at 18 years old as a bassist, eventually touring overseas, writing albums, getting endorsements, playing festivals, and going through countless terrible haircuts. After about four years, having had enough of traveling, sleepless nights, and living his rockstar fantasies, he finally applied for a music degree in London.
Whilst studying, he met collaborators and Eldest Souls game creators Jonathan Costantini and Francesco Barsotti at a free workshop where they were showcasing a very early beta of the game. Sergio was the only one to defeat their ridiculously imbalanced demo boss (which he’s pretty sure is how he got the gig in the first place) and from then on started writing music and designing the sounds for the video game.
Since that day, Sergio began completely immersing himself in game audio and what it took to work in video games, having no idea that a publisher was going to pick up the title and fund their debut IP. Education then took less priority with Jonathan and Francesco dropping out to focus on development full time. Roughly 3 years later, after countless conventions, demos, interviews, and hours of eyestrain behind a computer screen, they got their release date.
Although Sergio’s degree took him down a more classical music path, he still references metal music and guitar as his main influence, still pouring all his teenage angst and pent-up anger into every piece of music he writes. Whether it be orchestral or electronic, his bass guitar is always in some way still involved in his writing or recording.
Sergio’s ambition is to keep leaning into his heavier influences and see how far he can push the modern, aggressive, orchestral sound.
For more information, contact: www.lakeshorerecords.com
Jeremy [Six Strings]
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