A note from Mute Branches:

It is my honour to curate this selection of tracks by one of the most elusive video game composers of all time. Not much is known about the composer in question – even their name is lost to time. Until this release, all anyone knew of their work was their legendary soundtrack for the extremely pioneering (and extremely rare) Super Nintendo survival horror game 'Manor of the Lich'.

Upon completing work on the soundtrack for the never-released sequel, 'Manor of the Lich II', the Composer faxed a colleague describing it as “[their] masterwork... sure to be the 'Rite of Spring' moment for the field of computer game music... these sounds can open the door to new worlds...”

This elation would be short-lived, however. Corporate bosses wanted all the development work to be scrapped and worked on again, from the ground-up, so 'Manor of the Lich II' could release on the then-new PlayStation console. With an extremely tight deadline, the team worked themselves to the bone. The Composer – having already pushed both their own limits and those of the original hardware for the first soundtrack – was driven to unimaginable stress at the prospect of doing that all again. As far as we know, they only managed to rush out these seven tracks before embarking on a far more mysterious project...

It was when a courier came to the Composer's house to pick up the music (with mere days to go before the proposed release date) that they found the front door ajar. Stepping into the house, the courier found only empty rooms – a hastily-built labyrinthine maze of extensions, strangely invisible from the outside.

“I walked through empty room after empty room,” the courier stated on an archived forum post, “At first, I was looking for the composer and then just desperate to find my way out... I must have walked for... I don't even know how long. My mouth was dry, my stomach cavernous. I fell to my knees out of sheer relief when I finally stepped through yet another anonymous doorway and found myself outside again. And there, in the grass, was a small DAT tape.”

This is that tape.