Original game soundtrack

1. Menu Music
2. Blue Meadows
3. Tech Tree
4. Scrahara Desert
5. Nuptial Flight
6. Toxic Wasteland
7. Credits
8. Concrete Fields
9. Map Mode
10. Static Jungle

cd-r/download/stream, February 2025

Available on Bandcamp
or stream on your platform of choice

After the projects WiFi Angels and The Modular Body, Rutger Zuydervelt teams up with Floris Kaayk again. This time it’s a video game, which Floris developed together with Tijmen Meijer. It’s the second game for me to score, after the Astroneer.

In Microtopia the player manages a colony of robot ants, designs a network of transport trails, explores unique environments, and expands settlements. The goal is to reproduce, to create young ants that will fly out during the nuptial flight to spread out to distant lands, starting the cycle anew. Here's a game-play video, to get an idea of the look and feel of Microtopia:

Compared to Astroneer, the music in Microtopia is more atmospheric, and a bit darker. Each biome (worlds the player explores) has its characteristics, including its own soundscape. This sound reacts on the player and develops and morphs as the game progresses. On the soundtrack album though, the tracks are obviously presented as fixed versions.

Reviews

The Wire

Rutger Zuydervelt Microtopia Machinefabriek DL Netherlands based Rutger Zuydervelt was one of the most prolific explorers of atmospheric sound in the 2000s, bringing together ambient music, guitar drone, electronics and field recordings with an ease that gained him access to the weirdo noise scene, club-adjacent chill out culture and the global improvisation/collaboration network. Indeed, he was so prolific that his releases had a tendency to all blur into one (“I release everything I make,” he disclosed in an interview with Chris Sharp back in The Wire 292). In recent years, he’s found a telling context for his sound sketches by pairing them with other artforms – his Bandcamp page is jammed full of music for installations, dance, film and more.

Microtopia is Zuydervelt’s second soundtrack to a video game following his 2016 score for sci-fi explorer Astroneer. The problem (and the fascination) of soundtracking video games is that one important rhythm of the game is unpredictable and unknowable – the activity of the player. Music has to fit whether the player is fighting off dozens of assailants, or spending a dreary hour retracing footsteps looking for a key to a door. Some of the best game soundtracks like those for Silent Hill, the Resident Evil series and Bioshock remain suggestive no matter what is going on, and through carefully placed lacunae, stasis and imperceptible shifts, there’s a sense of development even without an obvious direction of travel. The tricks of soundtrack composers are like the opposite of musical codas – instead of finding ways to bring a composition to a close, they find ways to keep it open to anything.

Here, Zuydervelt soundtracks a game where the player manages a colony of robot ants. Many ingenious devices are heard: drones accruing slowly like clouds on “Blue Meadows”; ambiguous tonal centres on “Scrahara Desert”; slight but oblique shifts in intervals on “Tech Tree”. In place of the effortless drift of Astroneer, this score evokes a fragile, interdependent network of energies. True world-building music, it’s also some of Zuydervelt’s most memorable work.

Vital Weekly

Much like other functional music, i.e., music composed for a purpose (movie, theatre, choreograph), writing about music for games isn’t easy. I watch movies, sometimes see a theatre play and rarely a ballet, computer games do not belong to my interest sphere, never did and probably never will. I love to do so many other things; reading books and listening to music are two primary pastimes, and investing time in computer games never crosses my mind. My bad, no doubt, even though I also don’t see the necessity to defend myself. How to approach a release with such functional music? Probably very much the same as I do with movie soundtracks, of flicks I didn’t see (I rarely review a soundtrack of which I saw the movie); as a selection (most likely) of standalone pieces, somehow part of a computer game. As there’s a game trailer on Machinefabriek’s website, I learned it’s about robot ants, and you have to build cities and logistics. It looks good, yet no immediate urge to play it, which has a slightly busier soundtrack than the individual pieces here, which tend towards a more spacious ambient sound. ‘Toxic Wasteland’ sounds dirty, and the rhythms kick in with ‘Credits. ‘ The trailer music plays no role in these pieces, it seems—mostly gentle music, and as such, it works pretty well as standalone pieces. For all the unassuming listener knows, these are musical pieces to be enjoyed on a cold Sunday afternoon in January to bring warmth and joy to your life. It is the kind of music which goes very well if you read a book, for instance.