Aether & Iron is a video game set in an alternative New York City in the 1930s, a city floating in the sky thanks to the discovery of an anti-gravity element. The player plays Gia, a smuggler who sets out to explore the city, encountering various highs and lows along the way.
The music for the game is from Christopher Tin and Alex Williamson. Tin is probably best-known for his “Baba Yetu” theme from the 2005 game Civilization IV, which became the first piece of video game music to win a Grammy, though he has been a concert composer of some repute alongside his occasional forays into game music; Williamson is more of a newcomer, but has racked up a few scores for games over the last few years.
They receive joint credit for each track on the soundtrack – I don’t know if they did work together or separately, but there’s certainly no lack of coherence or ever the sense of there being multiple driving forces behind the music. And the music is great. It’s a big, orchestral score featuring some jazz elements that combines romance, action and noir into a tantalising package that makes for a really satisfying album.
That romantic side is heard with real sweep in the opening “A City of Aether and Iron” and then comes the jazz in the swinging “Sun on the Breeze”; at times there seems to be a hint of John Williams to the music, first in “For Nellie” where jazz touches are disguised at the heart of solid orchestral music (as Williams has liked to do on occasion). A more overt reference comes in “Take to the Streets”, which has unmistakable echoes of Williams’s “Anderton’s Great Escape” from Minority Report (and its counterpart in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones).
Actually though the bulk of the noir stylings of the score hearken back not to what most people now thing of as the sound of film noir (which was essentially invented by Jerry Goldsmith for Chinatown in 1974) but more like what the Golden Age Hollywood noirs actually sounded like, which was very much Miklós Rózsa’s domain – the angular, sometimes jarring progressions creating tension, often intertwined with swirling psychological feelings from the strings – Tin and Williamson’s music doesn’t sound out of place in 2026 but when they are going fully into that noir territory it is quite wonderful to hear such a well-done tribute to great film music of the past.
And while there are clearly Rózsa and Williams references as well as a hint at times of Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront in particular from the rumbling percussion, this isn’t all just pastiche and homage by any means, I should stress. There’s a murky vibrancy to cues like “A Dangerous City” which has a real flair to it all of its own and the way the various elements are pulled together into a surprisingly cohesive whole is surely unique (it’s almost like a journey back through almost a century of musical noir).
In amongst all that are also strewn a few tracks more of the “epic” variety – the massed choral forces at the start of “Nations Crusade Adagio”, and the spectacular rendering of the main theme in “Elegy” in particular. As the album concludes with the smoky jazz of “In the City’s Shadow”, one can reflect on a particularly solid and entertaining time: running a tight 57 minutes, there’s never a dull moment and the whole thing is very well put together and polished. Highly recommended.
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