\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>or the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory \u2013 if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That\u2019s not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody\u2019s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse.<\/p>\n \u201cLike many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,\u201d she says. \u201cI watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn\u2019t writing music, I wasn\u2019t even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn\u2019t bear it. I\u2019m still trying to work out what that rejection was about \u2013 I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn\u2019t even feeding or dressing myself.\u201d<\/p>\n One day last year, however, Curry made the decision to start listening to her music again. Not yet ready to compose, she began cataloguing her work instead, putting it in some sort of order after years of manic productivity. The result is Shielding Songs, an album mostly made up of new versions of her favourite pieces, arranged as lusciously ethereal choral works featuring the acclaimed London Voices choir. \u201cShielding Songs is a kind of gathering together, almost like a manifesto. I was thinking, what do I believe as a composer? What is my legacy? And I have to say, I did think it was going to be the last thing I would put out. And I was like, if it is going to be the last thing, I want it to be good. And I want it to say the things that I feel are important.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Lusciously ethereal \u2026 A recording session for Shielding Songs with the London Voices.<\/span> Photograph: Jessica Curry<\/p>\n Among them are four pieces from Everything\u2019s Gone to the Rapture, a game about the apocalypse from the point of view of a tiny English village that won Curry a Bafta for her soundtrack. Created by developer The Chinese Room, of which Curry and her husband Dan Pinchbeck were co-founders, it drew praise for its lavish bucolic setting and highly emotional score, heavily inspired by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. It has been some of her most popular music.<\/p>\n \u201cI still get emails about it 10 years later,\u201d she says. \u201cSo many people have Rapture tattoos \u2013 I often get emails that say, I only listen to death metal, but I love this soundtrack. That game has stuck with people, but I wanted to reimagine the music. The Mourning Tree is not the most played track on the score, but it\u2019s the one that people write to me about. Lots of people have played it at funerals. And I thought, there is something beautiful I can do with a purely choral arrangement here.\u201d<\/p>\n Another reason Rapture is so prominent on the new album is the parallel between its story of growing isolation at the end of the world and the experience of the Covid years. \u201cThe game is about what it means to be human, what does it mean to love?\u201d she says. \u201cAnd interestingly it has a lot of tie-in with a global event like a pandemic and how we cope with that.\u201d Curry has described Shielding Songs as an exploration of what it means to love and grieve in isolation, but it is also a hopeful study of human endurance. Four of the tracks come from her anti-war requiem Perpetual Light, first performed in 2011 \u2013 a response to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, undercut with a sense of hope for the future.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A piece from Chinese Room\u2019s VR sci-fi adventure So Let Us Melt is included too. The titular track is a wilting choral work inspired by John Donne, but the other tracks on the score are more experimental and hint at where she is heading musically. \u201cYou can tell it\u2019s mine, but it\u2019s a kind of weird mix of Baba O\u2019Riley with minimalism, with a classical bent, but it also sounds like it\u2019s from a film,\u201d Curry says. \u201cIt\u2019s got that sort of epic space opera feel, and everything for me coalesced into that score. I loved the sound.\u201d<\/p>\n Curry and Pinchbeck (to whom one beautiful new song on the album, Rest With Your Dream, is dedicated) sold The Chinese Room to Sumo Digital in 2018; Curry departed, Pinchbeck stayed on as creative director, overseeing Bafta-winning oil rig horror adventure, Still Wakes the Deep, but left in 2023. Now the duo have formed a small new studio, and are working on fresh concepts. \u201cMaybe we\u2019re insane,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I think we are good at making games, me and Dan. We have things to say.\u201d Curry is still sick, and she still worries about going out, especially now that some people have become aggressive toward those who wear protective masks. But she is composing again.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first time in a long time that I can hear music properly, in my head,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t think it would happen again, and I think it is going to be something new. It will be Jessica Curry, but I\u2019m not the same person that I was. When really bad things happen to you, you don\u2019t go back. The ground doesn\u2019t just solidify again. Trauma is messy and it\u2019s exhausting, but music will come from it.\u201d<\/p>\n Shielding Songs is out now via Bandcamp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory \u2013 if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That\u2019s not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[299,2116,378,2115,1700,686,2117,2118,2114],"class_list":{"0":"post-9658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-album","9":"tag-curry","10":"tag-games","11":"tag-jessica","12":"tag-messy","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-shielding","15":"tag-songs","16":"tag-trauma"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}