If you’ve been spending lots of time in V Rising recently, you’ve heard the atmospheric music composed by Aleksandria Migova. Today, the Stunlock Studios team has a new “Songs of Vardoran” trailer highlighting the music and an interview with Migova herself on her career and the process of composing for the regions and moods of Vardoran.
Migova’s music career has taken her from being a DJ in clubs in Paris to launching a small record label for club tunes and then eventually playing a small role on music tracks for Dead Island: Epidemic. After that, she began doing more game music as a freelance composer.
In the interview, she details her musical process and how she decided what sounds and even instruments made sense to create compositions that reflected the journey and the world. When asked to describe the sound of V Rising in three words, she answers, “Forsaken, mysterious, and soul-touching”. The music looks to convey this, and the differences between day and night, regions, to mysterious dark locations and happenings. Each region not only has its own music, it has day and night music.
Migova even used some very old sounds to get an authentic feel that suited the dark mystery. “One of the main and returning instruments of the album is a sampled ‘Huberman’ Stradivari violin from the year 1713. Even if the music is a modern production, I really wanted to have fragments of old, almost ancient-sounding instruments in the mix, communicating the rich and mysterious history of Vardoran,” she says.
When it comes to the vampire side of V Rising, “There is often a great conflict within vampires, which I find interesting. With the backstory of vampires being pushed back into the catacombs and now waking up as strangers in a world new to them, there is this layer of melancholic emotion that I try to communicate through the soundtrack.”
For the full interview, head over to V Rising.
