Sword & Sworcery

Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies, the companion record to the videogame Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, as well as a selection of records connected to Sworcery, are embedded & linked at right. More information, including album artwork and a write-up about Jim Guthrie, can be found below. Music is the foundation of this project and there's a wealth of material to enjoy.

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Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies (2011)

ENJOY THIS RECORD via Jim Guthrie's bandcamp and elsewhere, occasionally available on vinyl.

This record is a classic! It feature all the material from S:S&S EP and then some.

Much more about this record below this section.

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Scythian Steppes: Seven Songs of #Sworcery Localized For Japan (2012)

ENJOY THIS RECORD via Jim Guthrie's bandcamp & elsewhere.

This album features some hot remixes by some notable Japanese videogame composers including Michiru Yamane (Castlevania series), Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill series), Mitsuto Suzuki (Final Fantasy series), Baiyon (Pixeljunk), Decassegui Hip (???) & Macotom 3. This album was put together by 8-4 Ltd, who handled the localization & launch of S:S&S EP in Japan, where videogame designer Suda 51 provided the voice of Logfella.

Mentioned above:

News post about Sukimisu aka S:S&S EP in Japan, and Scythian Steppes thx to 8-4 Ltd is over here.

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Jim Guthrie's Children of the Clone (2012)

ENJOY THIS RECORD via Jim Guthrie's bandcamp & elsewhere.

Around 2002, Jim Guthrie made a pile of music on his Playstation One using MTV Music Generator.

A few years later, some of these songs inspired the Superbrothers clips Children of the Clone & Dot Matrix Revolution. Other songs created by Jim at that same time inspired S:S&S EP - Under a Tree, for example.

If you've heard and enjoyed Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies then you'll want to hear some of these songs Jim was cooking up on his Playstation. This record contains some miscellaneous gems (Economica, Jimmy's Lament, Lust In Space) & at least one lost masterpiece (Roomful of Empty People) - it's exciting getting this material out in the open!

The Jim Guthrie portrait on the box in the cover image is by illustrator Steve Courtney who created the portrait for an article in Kill Screen Magazine.

Mentioned above:

Superbrothers clip for Children Of The Clone (2005) on vimeo.
Superbrothers clip for Dot Matrix Revolution (2007) on vimeo.

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Scntfc's Moon Grotto 7" (2012)

ENJOY THIS RECORD via Scntfc's bandcamp & elsewhere.

A mysterious loop from deep inside the foothills of Mingi Taw, remixed in this limited edition tidbit.

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One Of These Days I'll Get It Right (2014) by Jim Guthrie & Solid Mas

ENJOY THIS RECORD via Jim Guthrie's bandcamp & elsewhere.

Don't sleep on these masterful hip hop beat-heavy remixes drawn from Jim Guthrie's catalog and given new life by Solid Mas, including #sworcery's Ode To A Room, Bones McCoy, Prettiest Weed and others.

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A WRITE-UP ABOUT JIM GUTHRIE

By Michael Barclay, March 20, 2011

Jim Guthrie helped define Toronto’s musical underground in the last decade, as a solo artist, as a member of Royal City, and as co-founder of Three Gut Records (Constantines, Cuff the Duke), an acknowledged influence on the rise of Broken Social Scene, Feist, Owen Pallett and other international success stories from Toronto.

Today, he’s poised to be part of another entirely different movement. With Guthrie’s new album Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies—the first released under his own name in eight years—he joins Toronto’s new wave of innovation by writing the score for a new videogame called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a multimedia project that combines a lush 8-bit inspired aesthetic, Twitter, narrative elements that echo The Legend of Zelda and Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, the lunar calendar and other surprising elements. Wired UK included it in a list of the “Top 10 videogame releases to watch in 2011” alongside larger scale efforts like Nintendo's 3DS, Rockstar's L.A. Noire & Sony's Uncharted 3.

Guthrie and videogames go way back. A self-taught musician and home recorder, Guthrie began performing live with a Sony Playstation in 2002, playing music he composed with the MTV Music Generator software while on tour across North America and Europe in Royal City. The influence of gaming music could be heard on his first two albums, 1999’s A Thousand Songs (a compilation of home-recorded cassettes) and 2002’s Morning Noon Night.

By 2003’s Now More Than Ever, Guthrie had embraced a more organic approach, which got him mainstream attention, licensing deals, a Juno nomination, and respect from a new band from Montreal called Arcade Fire, who borrowed his string section to record their album Funeral. Shortly afterward, Guthrie took a day job writing advertising jingles (including the international Capital One “hit” “Hands in My Pocket”), with some film scores on the side. He joined Islands’ Nick Thorburn to form the duo Human Highway, whose self-titled debut came out in 2008.

Sword & Sworcery represents his greatest challenge yet, and not just for its combination of classic film scores that echo John Carpenter and Ennio Morricone with gaming music both vintage and modern, all the while retaining his distinct personal approach. Guthrie wrote a fully realized score that could not only be deconstructed into loops for various levels of game play, but could also allow room for player interaction.

“Sometimes the music just ends up playing during the game—more times than not,” Guthrie explains. “But there is an element on certain boards where it’s a musical puzzle. You lock into this drone music and you have to interact with the environment and solve a musical puzzle by touching trees and bushes that release musical ‘sprites’ into the forest.” He admits that the game, and the music’s role in it, isn’t easy to explain—and nor should it be. “You don’t want people to understand it all immediately; it’s about designing something that works on a fundamental level that keeps you looking.”

Writing music for a game and having it stand on its own merits are two different challenges, of course. The vinyl version of the album (there are no CDs) has 14 songs and 40 minutes of music; the digital version (available with the vinyl purchase) has 28 songs.

But if the game is as intriguing and enjoyable as its designers hope it is, why would anyone put on Guthrie’s album in their other free time? “You can’t hear all the music at once because it’s mixed differently than the album and spread out over the entire experience—which takes at least one moon cycle to complete,” says Guthrie, not exaggerating in the least (the game is linked to the lunar calendar). “One of our earliest goals for the game was to create a space that could also be described as ‘an album you can walk through.’ That concept changed a bit along the way, but I always wrote the music with the album in mind.”

Guthrie’s relationship with Superbrothers Inc. founder and illustrator Craig D. Adams, the sole artist and animator on the videogame project, goes back to 2004, when Adams, a fan, struck up a correspondence and Adams used some of Guthrie’s Playstation material to score some animated shorts. The two worked closely together on the game's development, a collaboration with the more seasoned videogame designers & programmers at Capy, a Toronto videogame studio making its name in recent years with critically acclaimed efforts like the Playstation Network game Critter Crunch, and the upcoming Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes for Playstation 3 & Xbox 360. Capy effectively made the project happen from start to finish, with Capy creative director Kris Piotrowski on-board as a designer to guide the project to completion.

Guthrie describes both the game’s visual aesthetic and his music as “very 1978 meets 2011. I use some shitty 8-bit drum sounds alongside orchestra samples.”

Being one part of a triumverate allows the normally modest Guthrie to be more boastful than usual about a project he’s incredibly proud to be a part of. He says, “This is three different mediums connecting in an unusual way: the coders, the game designers and me; we’re all working independently in our own fields and we came together here. Not many other people are designing games this way. A lot of credit goes to Capy for putting up with the craziness."

He admits, however, that so far “only the nerdiest of the nerds are super curious. This game might be too weird and too involved for most.” So is Sword & Sworcery to Angry Birds what Jim Guthrie is to Black Eyed Peas? “Could be,” he laughs. “This game is like The Velvet Underground. It may have popular appeal in a cult way. There probably won’t be shirts at the mall with the characters on it. But it will have its place in terms of there being nothing like it.”

Of course, the same is true of Guthrie’s own music. He hopes to release his long-delayed “normal” album by year’s end, featuring tracks started back in 2005, in a recording session at Arcade Fire’s church studio. Sword & Sworcery is no stopgap release, however; it fits in perfectly with his discography, expands his craft and finds him once again at the centre of a creative movement in Canada’s largest city.