Each time period and setting provides a totally new backdrop to play around in sonically. Taking an ancient war horn that’s thousands of years old, and smashing it through distortion on top of a bed of analog synths feels perfectly at home in the world of Assassin’s Creed, and that’s why I love it. Sarah Schachner: The merging of old and new, ancient and modern is so interesting to me and I never get tired of it.
It seems like the Assassin’s Creed series would be a dream in that each entry is so different, that the series’s larger conceit (The Animus, a sort of meta VR layer on top of the games) provides a pretty good excuse to not feel 100% tied to traditional music. We spoke with Kyd and Schachner via email about working on an iconic series, collaborating during a pandemic, and growing up with a viking ship in the backyard. Kyd notes that Valhalla, which was a global collaboration between 16 of Ubisoft’s studios, features around eight hours of music in total. From Schachner’s ethereal and soaring “Frozen Lands” to Kyd’s haunting reinvention of the series’s marquee song “Ezio’s Family,” the score-which is deployed in-game with admirable restraint that makes it all the more effective when it hits-is a blockbuster. Its music, which Kyd and Schachner created alongside collaborator Einar Selvik (also of the traditionally rooted, Nordic folk act Wardruna), reflects Valhalla’s grandiosity.
Set primarily in Viking-era Norway and England, Valhalla is a technically and narratively complex game that attempts to tie many of the series’s story arcs together in a massive environment. It tells you something about Ubisoft’s ambitions for the recently released Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla that it brought two composers synonymous with the series together to collaborate on the game’s music. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track