The Glitch You Want to Hear

You can kill the video game, but you can’t kill its soundtrack.

Two years after the online game Glitch shut down, its music is being resurrected by composer Daniel Simmons. He remixed the original tracks and is now excited to share the music with reminiscing fans.

“It was the players who inspired it,” Simmons said. “When the game shut down people wanted a piece of it to hold onto.”

The Glitch Soundtrack is a collection of musical arrangements featured in Glitch, a short lived, massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), developed by Flickr and Slack co-creator Stewart Butterfield in 2011. Its newly released soundtrack consists of two albums: Soundscapes of Ur and Glitch Variations.

Soundscapes of Ur is a series of ambient songs that reflect the different lands in Glitch’s virtual world.
It involves a diversity of sounds and instrumentation performed by Toronto musicians. Have a listen to Callopee, one of my favourite pieces in the collection.

Glitch Variations features some of the tunes played more seldom in the game, usually used to signify a special occasion. For example the fiddle and banjo driven song Game of Crowns, was used for races in the game. This album also includes a handful of compositions by French composer Xavier Vochelle.

“I think it is remarkable, especially for a video game, that most of the instruments are real,” Simmons explains. “The base of these textures are made with these instruments but I would use electronic effects to carry them into a different realm.”

When he is not composing, Simmons is producing or playing an instrument in his home city of Toronto. He is a talented guitarist, old-time fiddler and has been singing and playing the banjo in an active bluegrass quartet for seven years.

“We perform every Thursday,” Simmons says. “Recording an album with them is definitely next on the horizon.”

The Glitch Soundtrack was released at the end of January and is now available for download online.