News broke yesterday morning, via HaloWaypoint, that Neil Davidge is scoring the next installment in the Halo series of video games. Not altogether unexpected, as he composed the music featured in the teaser trailer for Halo 4 that came out last summer.
Neil, of course has been Massive Attack's faithful co-writer and producer going on about 17 years now. Last I heard, I thought he was working on a solo album, but this news, after doing a bit of reading up on the Halo franchise is pretty exciting.
I'm a complete Halo noob, even though I'm aware its a pretty big deal in the game industry, with something approaching $2 billion in revenue over the last 10 years. And to be honest a definite step up from scoring "Push" and "Clash Of The Titans". Neil's work on them was great, but the films themselves left a lot to desired.
Here is a small sample of the soundtrack score that's been released as a tease, which I'm also featuring on the front page of my YouTube Channel for the next while.
Taken from yesterday's press release is a good quote from Neil on scoring the game and how it was actually working with Massive Attack that got him into playing the games originally.
“I don’t really play a lot of video games, but I’ve always played Halo. I started when I was making 100th Window with Massive Attack; it was how I entertained myself while I was waiting for the band to show up. Even later on if I was in the studio and feeling frustrated, Halo was one of the first things I’d turn to to get my head straight.”
Besides the press release I also found four new interviews with Neil that came out yesterday, concerning his involvement in the Halo 4 soundtrack. Here are the ones I could find:
MTV Interview (Featuring 2 Video Interview Segments)
I also read that the Neil’s score will get an official release at the same time the game is due out, which is scheduled for some time coming up close on Christmas. Looking forward to it! I might actually have to pick up the game at that time as well to and see what all the fuss is about.
Mezzanine will be 20 years old now this April. I don't know about you but I definitely feel a bit older having typed that. Mezzanine was my gateway drug into not only Massive Attack but into alternative and electronic music in general. Bear in mind I was in my earlier teens at the time, but Mezzanine really shook me up the first few months I listened to it and changed my opinion of what music could be.
Embedded at the top of this post is a new documentary entitled "Where Do You Draw The Line?" from WordSmith Productions who have generously uploaded the entire hour long documentary to Vimeo for free as of today.
Close to two years after first getting word of this project, (check out this blog post of the initial announcement in May 2013), the end result of the unique but maybe not altogether surprising pairing of Del Naja and Yorke was just released online as a free stream via Soundcloud.