1000 Eyes - VHOLUME (OST)

The game this scores is worth describing first. VHOLUME is a parkour game set in the derelict capital of Afro-Eurasia, a city administered entirely by an entity called the Ministry. Your protagonist, Robert, is not fighting anyone. He is chasing ration tickets through a concrete labyrinth whose scale is described, with beautiful precision, as “the Ministry’s org chart rendered at 1:1 scale.” The obstacles are locked doors, revoked permits, bureaucratic inertia. You run, climb, slide, and fill in forms. There is no violence, only architecture.

Knowing this changes how you hear the music, and how you hear the music changes how you might expect a game like this to sound. Composer Tom Schley, who built a cult following through his work on the SIGNALIS soundtrack and his own albums Duality and CHARON, could have matched the parkour with something propulsive, something that pushes. Instead, VHOLUME the soundtrack rarely breaks double-digit tempo. It is patient, desolate, and oddly tender for music set inside a bureaucratic dystopia.

Across 57 tracks and well over two hours, Schley builds the city in sound the same way the game’s visuals build it architecturally: through repetition with small variations, ambient pieces returning in slightly altered form to suggest the same corridors traversed at different hours or emotional states. The naming logic tells you everything. You move through conapt00, then conapt00 II, then conapt04, conapt05, conapt05 II, each a variation on a theme that is never quite resolved. The sewers have their own pieces. So do the jungle, the windfarm, the open-plan offices. This is not a soundtrack you listen to for peaks; it is one you inhabit.

Konstantin Schimanowski, the Berlin-based musician credited on several tracks, contributes pieces that lean slightly harder into unsettlement, “mechanisms01” and “vestiges” among the moments where the album’s surface calm cracks just enough to let something colder through. The collaboration is seamless, though, and the album reads as a unified statement rather than a shared project.

The Bandcamp Daily comparison to Boards of Canada and Oneohtrix Point Never is a useful shorthand that the album quickly outgrows. What Schley is doing here is closer to functional environmental scoring in the tradition of Brian Eno’s ambient series: music that performs a space rather than commenting on it. The fact that space is a collapsing concrete city governed by paperwork gives it an edge that ambient music rarely carries. Karl Barnes’s mastering at Loom Sound Studio keeps everything appropriately flat and unspectacular in the best sense, no dramatic dynamic shifts, no moments where the recording draws attention to itself.

At 57 tracks it is, on paper, unwieldy. In practice, it works the way good architecture works: you don’t need to see all of it at once to understand what it is.

VHOLUME (Original Soundtrack) is out now via Bandcamp