True story – I used to compose music a lot as a teen. I was incredibly obsessed with weird time signatures (I have no idea how many songs I wrote in 5/4, 7/4, 7/8, etc.) in a way that was therapeutic. It was a weird time and stretching myself creatively to try and express those feelings helped a lot with having a way to externally witness what I was going through at that time.

CUE SEVERAL DECADES LATER (more like two)

We knew pretty early on that we’d likely be composing music for the game to accompany the TTRPG experience, namely because we really wanted to make this as immersive as possible without going overboard. I’ll admit, though, that the idea of diving back into musical composition after so long was giving me a mild panic. It had been so long that I had to take the time to look up the most basic stuff that I knew from studying music for several years like time signatures and understanding tempos. BUT taking the time to really sit and figure out what the theme for Ash and Flowers would be ended up triggering some pretty big discussions around the general tone and direction for the game.

One of the things that I was able to figure out after starting to work with E a bit on the projects over the last year or so is that everything has a mild horror undertone to it. Whether it’s the comics, the tarot deck or Ash and Flowers, we really wanted to embrace the darker side to everything we were developing in order to better highlight the lighter/brighter/more hopeful side to everything.

The last week was when we decided to really start focusing on the theme and the biggest stump we had was the time signature. We were torn between using 2/4 (Typical Military/Marching time signature) or the standard 4/4 time signature that a lot of music was written in.

Then something clicked: Let’s go with 3/4 – the standard time signature for a waltz.

The moment we brought that up, a lot about the game, the story and it’s tonal direction started to click in place – especially with how the book is currently being set up to be written similar to a play. Going with a Waltz gave us the freedom to really embrace the idea that this is a game where there are clear Roles to be Played. Everyone is moving through the ball room that is the world of Azraeém and similar to a waltz, everyone is playing off of each other to create the dance that will eventually be the “Play” or the TTRPG.

From here, it was time to just start tossing stuff in and seeing where things go, so we’re really excited to present to y’all the basic intro (around 30 seconds) for the theme that is definitely 100% not complete because we’re aiming for this to be around 1:50 to 2:00 in length but the intro is just… honestly not at all what we were expecting but pretty much bang on for what we were hoping for:

(PREEMPTIVE LOUD VOLUME WARNING! We still haven’t done the actual audio engineering part so it may start off loud depending on your speaker/headphone settings)

Yes the leading instrument is an Accordion as a stand in for Savari as the narrator of the story 😈

Everything was done in Reaper using some VSTs from the ever growing library I’ve been quietly building for not nearly long enough to justify the amount I’ve collected. Again, there’s a hell of a lot of tweaking and writing that we’ll need to do for this to be considered done but we’re both very happy with where this is and felt like sharing.

We hope you enjoy the preview and we’ll be seeing you!