In her own in short, Michelle Zauner, known as the indie-pop singer of Japanese breakfast, did not grow up in a high-culture household. In the 1990s, her Oregon parents did not show her fine arts, foreign directors, or classical literature. What Zauner had were video games, first on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and then on the PlayStation. She remembers playing the cooperative JRPG, 1993 Mana’s secret, 5 years old with his father. Because she was so young, she didn’t quite control her hands, it took literally years to graduate. “When we finished this game, I had the feeling that we really went through something together,” she said by phone from San Francisco, the afternoon before the Japanese breakfast show. It was a real journey.
While composing the soundtrack to the adventure in an open world Sable, Sauner often returns to Hiroki Kikuta Mana’s secret soundtrack. “The music on the main menu is so special,” she continues. “I thought a lot about this game, how its brief introductory animation and music made me feel – and I just really wanted to make it happen. Sable.”
That Sauner has to get his childhood for inspiration makes perfect sense. Sable is an adult story set in a vast, mythical desert filled with destructive spaceships, crumbling monuments and ancient temples. His titular character, the young Sable, is about to undergo Sliding, a rite of passage on his way to adulthood. She is small and brave, but the world is big and scary. Zauner’s soundtrack with thoughtful pop tracks, gorgeous surrounding numbers and silly handles controlled by characters, deftly convey this interior and exterior journey.
Sauner joined the project in 2017 after DM on Twitter by Daniel Fineberg, the game’s technical director. He was aware of Sauner’s attachment to video games because the promotion for her second album, Machinist, includes a 30-minute role-playing game inspired by SNES Japanese BreakQuest. Fineberg and creative director Gregorios Kiteotis also wanted an artist to sit outside the established group of video game composers, someone who knows video games but can turn existing tropes and conventions into something new. Sauner had seen the game early GIF files on Twitter, one depicting a hoverbike gliding silently through the swing dunes. “The art was so amazing,” she recalls. “I felt that our taste was leveling from the beginning.”
With just a rough sense of the game’s atmosphere based on these images, plus a handful of area descriptions in Google Doc, Zauner immediately set to work. Initially, she composed in the back of her touring van a laptop and an OP-1 synthesizer. Then in 2018 and 2019, longer recorded videos began to arrive, helping to clarify whether he was on the right track. A year later, game versions of the game were sent, then the real work began. Most of the soundtrack was recorded during a lock in her studio in Adirondax, upstate New York, but “The Cartographer’s Theme,” a bold number that recalls the strange themes of the characters. Zelda games, was interrupted by a week-long retreat in a cabin belonging to the parents of sound designer Martin Quayle. “That was the only thing I could do there,” laughs Sauner.
She describes the compositional process as “true learning”. While her Japanese breakfast songs are rooted in standard pop structures, Sable meant that Sauner had to compose mood-creating instrumental pieces. To maintain a seamless atmosphere, these songs must be written in such a way that they can be repeated to infinity to adjust how much time a player can spend in an area. Initially, Sauner did not write them in such a way that he had to go back and tweak the MIDI files to turn them into “perfect loops”. The composer credits sound designer Kvale for helping her achieve this, but also for making them feel part of the game’s rocks and destructive architecture.