Merry almost Christmas everyone!  Borealis here!

It's the start of the festive week, and to kick it off, I have three more tracks from the Venus: Improbable Dream soundtrack for you!  The video below gives you all the previews you need.  Let's dive in!

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Fracture

We're starting with probably the most tense track on the soundtrack.  'Fracture' plays when Kakeru is feeling completely overwhelmed, his senses overstimulated, and is having a panic attack.  Luckily, this doesn't happen too often during the game, but as is the unfortunate truth of anxiety, it's not always avoidable.  I decided to open the track with the sounds of glass shattering and ice cracking , to represent his mental composure splintering to breaking point.  It then leads into a repetitive, sinister sounding piano section, with pounding percussion, augmented with a synth that's reminiscent of that piercing ringing you get in your ears when your consciousness is off balance.  I purposely made this track as intense as I did to really emphasise how desperate and doomed Kakeru feels in these moments, as though everything has gone wrong, and it feels like an almost life or death situation.

Stasis

Don't worry - we're onto much calmer songs now!  This is another piece that's solely for a guitar, and I remember coming across the melody that often starts off certain bars completely by accident.  I was simply plonking around to test out the guitar sound, and my fingers just randomly came up with the first four notes you hear on the track, with the little harmony at the end.  I instantly liked it, and pressed record while doing it again a bunch of times, wandering around various other notes to see what might sound good after it.  In the end, I actually quite liked the meandering style of it, so I decided to completely improvise the entire piece on the spot.  The only thing that was pre-planned was the idea that I'd repeat those four notes every now and then as a recurring motif.  The result is quite reflective of the moods that 'Stasis' accompanies - the downtimes between events when Kakeru is thinking deeply about something.  It also goes through both major and minor moments, taking the piece through both optimistic and worried sounds, so I think it works for multiple scenarios.

Shizuka

Here's another repurposed song.  The Japanese word 'shizuka' means 'quiet', and that's exactly what this song is for - moments of soft relaxation.  I wrote and recorded this track somewhere around 2017, I'd guess, and was nothing more than just a random thing that I came up with one day while noodling.  I had no plans for it, so when it was finished, I did nothing with it other than keep it on my hard drive.  I'm glad that it stayed there, as when I began composing for Venus, I knew straight away that 'Shizuka' would be perfect for it.  I tend to associate the piece with Haruka a lot, as it mostly plays when she and Kakeru are having a quiet moment together, often bonding over something personal in a meaningful way, or sometimes when they're just hanging out and feeling that little bit more relaxed than they do in the rest of their school days.

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And that's all for today!  Just a heads up - the next devlog lands on Christmas Day, and I'd like to leave you all to enjoy your days without distraction, so there will be no devlog on Friday.  Don't worry though - I'll be back like clockwork on Monday December 28th with more track previews and behind the scenes stories for you to enjoy, and you can still check in with the game's official Twitter for extra updates in between!

Have a lovely Christmas, and I'll see you again next week!

Borealis