Video-game soundtracks have often drawn upon club music for inspiration: Just think of the drum’n’bass of Soichi Terada’s music for Ape Escape, the hard techno of the PlayStation Ghost in the Shell game, even the straight-up proto-grime in an X-Men game for the Sega Genesis. In the case of London producer Dark0, the inspiration runs in the other direction. His new album Eternity feels as much like the accompaniment to imagined landscapes as the soundtrack to a long night in a warehouse.
Dark0 (Davor Bokhari) is one of the few non-Swedes signed to Stockholm’s Year0001—home to Yung Lean, Drain Gang, and Viagra Boys—but he sounds right at home on the label. Though it is steeped in the sad-boy aesthetic of Yung Lean and his crew, the label has recently expanded into a wide range of electronic subgenres, particularly with last year’s Rift ONE compilation, that overlaps with Dark0’s own work. Since 2013, his releases have blended grime, trap, and club music with crystalline, cinematic sound design. He cites game scores as a touchstone for his music—the producer once recounted an album release party at which attendees played Mortal Kombat X on a projector while moshing and dancing to his music.
Eternity isn’t the soundtrack to a video game, but it feels like one. These are almost story songs, but the tale is told through an EDM structure of builds and drops, rising peaks followed by comedown periods and chilled-out piano lines. Dark0 draws on the melodramatic builds and spaced-out bliss of trance music, which gives a sense of warmth to a sound that might otherwise be cold or robotic. Tender and textured feminine voices are buried under layers of filters and effects, like a distant memory trapped in ice. More than clear voices, Dark0 prefers ASMR choruses on tracks like “zeroGen,” or the shrill, nightcore chipmunk tones of the uncanny R&B ballad “Wait for Me.”
Though he often plays with ambient textures, slower tempos, and abstracted sound effects, Dark0’s music celebrates the anthemic and over-the-top properties of mainstream club and rave styles—big beats, intense drops, and grinding trap drums—but in a somewhat warped form. If James Ferraro or Lorenzo Senni made more accessible club bangers, it might sound a little like the trance-trap fusion of “infinite edge.” The opening title track pairs Rustie-like trap bombast and grime wobbles with a distant Auto-Tuned voice, starting off dark and menacing before fading into a contemplative haze. “Shining Star” pitch bends and shifts like a gentle ray of light before a hardstyle beat breaks through.
Clean, shining piano keys undergird most of the album, grounding its ethereal synths with acoustic resonance. The combination of uplifting keyboard work, ambient soundscapes, and unabashed club textures sometimes suggests a modern reboot of pre-waiting room Moby albums like Everything Is Wrong—the intense piano loop of “Promise” recalls that album’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters,” immortalized as the needle-drop that plays over Al Pacino’s worn-out mug at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. The emotions have a heart-on-their-sleeve intensity that’s more in line with pop , but Dark0 brings an almost compositional precision to his mix of downtempo textures and high-intensity club music—the piano-driven "Nova Bridge" is straight out of a JRPG. There’s as much space for peace and solace as there is for kinetic energy and high BPMs, a reflective cut scene for every frenetic battle. Dark0 places special emphasis on the more fragile parts of songs, the quiet intros and outros that force you to turn the headphones up, making you work to realize their complexity. Sometimes his sounds are just a gentle wave crashing in and out of your speakers, like the disintegrated pulses of “Born From Decay.”
Thanks to the seamlessness with which streaming services are integrated into game consoles, it’s now relatively easy to mute in-game music and replace it with a soundtrack of your own curation—sometimes a necessity when you’re going mad hearing the same intense orchestral cue over and over during a boss fight. Dark0’s music wouldn’t exist if he’d turned down the sound of the games he grew up on, but Eternity is also perfect for that purpose; this is an album in search of images, one that begs to be played over snowy mountain peaks and stunning pixelated vistas. Eternity feels like the ideal experience of losing yourself in a video game: euphoric, enrapturing, and maybe a little overwhelming, as the world around you melts away and all that’s left is sensation.
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