1/3/2024 0 Comments Knockout city charactersIn one of our first meetings with the team at Velan Studios they asked us to deliver an “award-winning soundtrack” to which we said, “No problem!” As we keep working on bigger projects, there’s a lot more at stake and we’ve learned how to deal with that pressure. We brought in a dream team of talented players that made our tracks come to life in a special way. Something in particular that helped us create this music was all the amazing musicians we’d met from previous projects. MN: We learn something new with every project. Did you take anything away from that you were able to utilize when it came time to Knockout City? Further still, anything noteworthy from previous projects that were of particular help here? UD: You’ve crafted music for sports-related projects previously, most notably ESPN’s Monday Night Football. There was a small experimentation process while producing but we’d always come back to the same question: “Would this band use this sound?” If the answer was no, we’d change it up! We would sit and talk for hours about who the band was and what kind of instrumentation we would use to define them. SR & MN: We actually started with the identities. UD: What was the process for crafting these bands? How’d you arrive at each one? Did you start with the music and shape the identities of the bands around the sounds, or did you start with the sound and shape the identities around what felt correct at the time? ![]() That was something we knew we wanted to run throughout all of the music. The one thing that stayed constant through the bands was the use of brass and horns. We wanted every band to have their “thing.” So, while The Hologramatix have Doo-Wop vocals chopped and blended into an electro hybrid track, Johnny and The Breakers has a 1960’s Surf Rock core. It kept it fresh throughout the entire project and kept us on our toes! Because we were tasked with creating different bands, it expanded the musical palette of the soundtrack. One of the most enjoyable parts about writing this music was starting a new band. UD: How challenging was it to craft all these different distinct voices for the radio stations? To what degrees did you want them to feel different from one another, while still accounting for them showing up within the same game experience? Was that constraining in some ways? Freeing? The whole world of KO City is just so wacky and different in terms of its style, that it allowed us to really break free from those sonic tropes you are so used to and mash and cross genre lines we usually wouldn’t. Sonically, the one thing that might link this to music for sports games is the ridiculously high energy! Other than that, nothing about this process was traditional. Our goal was to enhance the artistically vibrant world of KO city. Sonny Rey: When we were presented with making the music for Knockout City, we definitely didn’t think of it as a traditional sports game. ![]() ![]() In what ways did you want to lean into those sonic tropes? And in which ways did you see an opportunity to distance yourselves from them? But Knockout City is far from a traditional sports game. ![]() Utopia District: There are certain sounds one might expect from a traditional sports game. Let’s dive in and see how Sonny and Matt crafted the music of the world of Knockout City. An online multiplayer dodgeball experience, Knockout City is a frantic, colorful world filled with zany characters, fun-as-heck gameplay, and an extraordinary array of music. But their newest project, Knockout City, is something…a bit different. The duo has contributed music to a number of projects, most notably ESPN’s Monday Night Football and the HBO series Lovecraft Country. We here at Utopia District recently had the absolute thrill of interviewing the game composer duo of Sonny Rey and Matt Naylor, collectively known as The Soundlings. Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, Listen To This Music, Dodge
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