2020 saw the release of two major scores from Gareth Coker– Ori and the Will of the Wisps, for which I wrote an article last week, and Immortals Fenyx Rising. While the former was the sequel to a beloved indie game, the latter was an original property from one of the biggest developers in the world.

Immortals Fenyx Rising was developed by Ubisoft Quebec, one of Ubisoft’s largest subsidiaries, who developed two of the latest Assassin’s Creed games; this game, actually, was born out of Odyssey’s development.

It follows Fenyx, a Greek warrior who sets out to save his brother and the inhabitants of the Golden Isle after they’ve been turned to stone, and becomes involved in a larger quest to restore the power of the Olympians and defeat Typhon.

I’ve had plans for an Immortals playlist for as long as the game and album has been out. In fact, the very first attempt at something like this happened back in January. Naturally, it was never finished then, partly because January is my catch-up month on all things from the previous year, and this score just ended up falling by the wayside. A couple of attempts were made in the following months with the same results.

As 2021 went by, Ubisoft started releasing DLCs for the game, and albums with them. Each release brought a bit of enthusiasm for this project back to me, as the idea to make a single playlist encompassing both the base game and DLCs started growing in my mind.

The creation of Modding the Score cemented my desire to resume the making of this playlist, now with the official addition of Myths of the Eastern Realm and The Lost Gods (an album that actually compiles the scores for two separate DLCs, A New God and The Lost Gods).

And now here it is, finally finished, as part of the latest installment of Modding the Score. Stay after the jump if you want to read how this playlist came to be. Enjoy!

TRACKLIST:
1. Fenyx’s Dawn
2. King’s Peak
3. The Observatory
4. Conflict in the War’s Den
5. The Song of the Crane (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
6. Messenger of the Gods
7. Zeus’s Trial of Blessing (The Lost Gods)
8. Goddess of Wisdom
9. Aphrodite’s Palace
10. A Sword and a Strike
11. Aphrodite’s Trial of Mystery (The Lost Gods)
12. Medusa the Mythical Gorgon
13. A Showcase of Power
14. Sky Dragon’s Grave (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
15. The Valley of Eternal Spring
16. Polyphemos the Mythical Cyclop
17. Zeus’s Trial of Mystery (The Lost Gods)
18. Goddess of Love
19. Lei Ze Skywell (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
20. Kottos the Mythical Hekatonchires
21. Tartaros Trials
22. The Peace Forge (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
23. Gong Gong, Leader of the Yan Di Tribe (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
24. The King Sees All
25. Devourer of Innocent Hearts, the Legendary Yayu (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
26. The Schemer Hades (The Lost Gods)
27. The Harbinger (Myths of the Eastern Realm)
28. Tribulations at the Gate of Tartaros
29. Facing One’s Fate
30. Noesis
31. Typhon’s Lair
32. Welcome to the Family
33. Heart of the Hero

Behind the Scenes

As is usual, my process begins with culling the albums for highlights. I had the huge advantage of having already gone through that process a couple of times on the main album from previous, failed attempts. Still, it didn’t hurt to listen to all of it again to see if I still agreed on the choices that past-me made.

As it turned out, I mostly did. The only changes I did this time around were the addition of five tracks; one of them was The Observatory, the other four were cut at later stages in the process, and were The Chains of Prometheus, God of War, Confronting Immortality, The Many Workshops and The Gods’ Vault.

The harder work on this front was spent on the DLC albums, The Lost Gods and Myths of the Eastern Realm. It was my first time listening to them, while I had spent many hours on the original album by that point.

The original album covers a lot of ground, and it ate up 64 minutes of the runtime, which left, by my original projections, 26 minutes for the DLCs (I was eyeing for a 90-minute runtime). I had to figure out how to best spread those 26 minutes across the two albums. That brings us to the differences between the two.

Myths follows a traditional musical narrative, but The Lost Gods is much more fragmented. This is due to the nature of the DLCs for which the music was written– Myths is story based, while both Gods ones are mostly challenge/combat based. This meant that I could intersperse tracks from the Gods album in the playlist much more easily than I would the ones from Myths.

This was confirmed as soon as I finished listening to Myths, when I understood that I was going to need to build some form of a narrative within the playlist in order to accommodate it. For obvious reasons, none of the major ideas introduced in that album appear on the main Immortals one, and it actually introduces a bit of a different soundscape, given the Chinese setting of the DLC. This all pointed in the direction of me having to devote more of the runtime to Myths than to Gods.

In the end, the final selection was four tracks from Gods and seven from Myths. Under different circumstances, I would’ve fixed that imbalance, but the music from the latter album did need that extra space.

And indeed, the first selections from both albums ended up being much more balanced than they are now. It was only after I had everything that I needed that I started shaping the structure of the playlist, and as it became clearer in my head, tracks started falling by the wayside.

I’ve already mentioned the tracks that didn’t make it from the main album. Among cut tracks from The Lost Gods were Athena’s Trial of Blessing, The Dudebro King Poseidon (which is a fantastic title, if I do say so myself) and The Devourer. From Myths, only Nuwa The Goddess was left out.

By that point, I had it clear in my head that the narrative of the playlist was going to be anchored on two ideas– the theme introduced in King of Gods from the main album that seems to relate to Zeus, and The Song of the Crane from the Myths album.

Zeus’s theme and The Song of the Crane became the backbone of the playlist, which is why the first tracks of the album were laid out in that way. Naturally, Fenyx’s theme had to open, and after that is King’s Peak, which plays with Zeus’s theme extensively, first on a gorgeous oboe, and then with the full orchestra and choir.

I wanted to extend the pensive nature of that track for a bit longer before I had to shift gears to full-on action, which is when The Observatory came in handy. Its gradual shift from calm to energetic made it the perfect transition to Conflict in the War’s Den, which actually plays during the second quarter of the album. Here I used it as a way of introducing the general style for the action music, with the chanting choir, urgent strings and energetic percussion.

Only then do I introduce The Song of the Crane. I needed to have the typical sound of the score fully introduced before I took a hard left to the Chinese sound. It was a tough balancing act; I felt that if I introduced it sooner, I would lead the listener to falsely believe that that sound was more prominent than it actually is, and if I introduced it later, I could risk the listener getting too used to the Greek sound and thus feel the whiplash of the new sound more harshly.

I think that it works as it is, which meant that the remaining tracks from Myths had to play in tandem with the rest of the music and not disrupt the flow or tone. This was an even tougher balancing act. It meant that both styles needed to follow a similar trajectory as the playlist progressed, to better facilitate the blending and complementing of the two, and it took a lot of chiseling away at the ordering of the tracks for weeks on end until I got it where I felt was right.

The final piece of the puzzle was Fenyx’s music. My predilection would’ve been for Fenyx’s own theme, introduced in Heart of the Hero from the main album, to lead the charge alongside Zeus’s theme and The Song of the Crane, but ultimately it takes a step back for the majority of the main album and it only takes the center stage again near the end. That left two choices for it– either respect the original intent or re-arrange those final tracks to make Fenyx’s theme more prominent throughout.

I ended up doing a little bit of both. The plan was to respect the order as it was, but I quickly realized that something was missing, and that something was caused by the removal of Confronting Immortality. The original order has this track placed between Typhon’s Lair and Facing One’s Fate, which means that the music follows an interesting dramatic arc where Fenyx’s theme builds up with energy in the thrilling Typhon’s Lair, then the score takes a plunge into darkness with the menacing Confronting Immortality for the final battle with Typhon, and then both Zeus’s and Fenyx’s theme triumphantly erupt out of Facing One’s Fate. The resolution comes in the form of Welcome to the Family, which leads into the tender Fenyx’s Dawn as the album closes.

The removal of Confronting Immortality happened because of a general choice to omit a major theme from the main album almost in its entirety. This theme initially represents Typhon but comes to encompass more than that as the story progresses, and is prominently featured in that track. In the end, other material just took precedence, and I felt like that theme was far too dominant to feature it in just a couple of tracks, especially when Confronting Immortality is meant to be the climax for something that has been developed over the course of an entire score. I would’ve had to cut a lot of other things to fit it in.

The absence of this then meant that I had to create a different climax with what I had. Noesis was a godsend (pun fully intended), because it allowed for that emotional resonance I was seeking to fill the void. The new climax begins with the action-heavy Tribulations at the Gate of Tartaros. The explosion of Zeus’s theme in Facing One’s Fate leads into an intimate statement of Fenyx’s theme, after which the playlist basically becomes one giant crescendo, spanning the second half of Facing One’s Fate, and the entirety of Noesis and Typhon’s Lair. The result, I hope, is that Typhon’s Lair acts as a triumphant climax for Fenyx’s theme, after which the playlist moves into the resolute Welcome to the Family.

The final wrinkle was that, because the ending isn’t as action-packed as on the album, it didn’t feel right to end on Fenyx’s Dawn (which was a nice send-off after the intensity of the original final tracks). It was then that the idea of moving that track to the beginning and bringing Heart of the Hero to the end was born.

Coker was absolutely right in opening his album with Heart of the Hero, but it felt just right to hear Fenyx’s theme soaring at the end of the playlist after the emotional finale I cooked up for it. As a byproduct of that, I like how Fenyx’s Dawn opens the playlist in tranquility and then builds to the thrilling action, rather than just jumping straight to it with Heart of the Hero.

I don’t think I’ve toiled away at the assembling of a playlist as much as this one. The amount of reshuffling that I had to do to the track order seemed endless. By this point, I’m pretty sure I know the music by heart. But it was very rewarding to put together, and it was a very welcome creative challenge.

I did my best to showcase the beautiful musical work that Gareth Coker created in a new light, and hopefully you enjoy listening to this as much as I did putting it together. If it’s your first time listening to anything of the score, hopefully the playlist encourages you to give a listen to the full thing. There are lots of great things in them that didn’t make it here!

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IMMORTALS FENYX RISING
Music by Gareth Coker
Orchestrations by Gareth Coker
Featured performances by Kelsey Mira (vocals), Kristin Naigus (woodwinds and aulos), Simon Chrisman (dulcimers), Zach Lemmon (lutes and guitars) & Gareth Coker (phorminx and lyre)
Featured performances on Myths of the Eastern Realm by Huang Ying (vocals), Elena Juatco (vocals) and Kristin Naigus (xun, xiao and sheng)
Recorded by Nick Spezia
Mixed by Steve Kempster