The Cheshire Cat music from 2020’s Down the Rabbit Hole was impish and bouncy, and remains one of my most streamed cues. In Escaping Wonderland the famous feline has a far more ominous persona, gloating over a frozen waste of a forest from which he’s driven all residents.

As you’d guess the music has changed as well, now a brooding melody for bass clarinet against cold string harmonies. There is however a quirky agility to the tune. (An evil cat is still a cat.)

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

Although Escaping Wonderland is a nonviolent video game, there’s plenty of fun action, often involving a slingshot. This week’s music selection accompanies a moment where the player knocks tubes into alignment in order to emancipate a flow of stolen creative energy in defiance of a callous Jabberwock and… it might be easier to play the game than for me to explain all this.

Anyway, enjoy today’s slingshot-minigame-in-a-cave music!

A game set in Lewis Carroll’s universe can be rightly expected to include a particular manxome foe. In Escaping Wonderland, he’s portrayed as the heartless boss of an overworked miner population, who needs to be taken down with some well-aimed slingshot sabotage.

To musically represent the dragonesque creature I gave a solo to the contrabassoon, the bigger and more ornery brother of the regular bassoon. It has a sinister growly quality that I felt was perfect for the character.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

In Escaping Wonderland (Cortopia Studios’ highly-acclaimed story-based VR game) you’re accompanied on much of your journey by an eponymous Dodo, a benevolent but nervous companion. Dodo gets his own musical theme, wherein I unabashedly stole Prokofiev’s idea of using a double reed instrument to evoke an eccentric avian. (In this case the instrument was English horn rather than oboe.)

Like Dodo himself, the theme is a bit off-balance and quirky, attempting lyricism but often stopping short unexpectedly, or retreating in a nervous flutter of notes.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

First off, happy (recent) New Year!

And now for something completely different. This cue from Escaping Wonderland is diegetic, or music that exists in the world of the game. The player has to raise the spirits of beleaguered mine workers (who happen to be cute sentient light bulbs) with a kind of steampunk jukebox. With the machine’s settings tweaked just right, the bulbs launch into a dance party.

The score here is happy electronic dance music, a bit innocent and naive, and incorporating some of the stone-like instrumentation that we hear throughout the mine region.