Whispers of Satan - Paul Corfiatis and Kristian Aro (2009)

Whispers of Satan has always been a little bit complicated to explain to people who go into it expecting fast pacing and furor. But assuming you don't want the long version, let me just sum it up with a phrase from the era of boomer shooters: Whispers of Satan is a whole vibe. Beginning as a relatively light-hearted romp through cute 2000s cratebases and Plutonic deathforts, it steers a hard left turn halfway through into the deepest pits of despair and inner darkness, with the remainder of the megawad dedicated to the long journey of finding the way back out, and the question of whether you ever truly can. To me, WoS stands with A.L.T. and Three Is a Crowd as one of the greatest narrative megawads ever made, but the music the two mappers hand-crafted to go with their maps is an absolutely crucial part of that experience.

Mirroring that narrative arc, the early tracks in the megawad are low-key and catchy, a sort of classic Doomy snack food but with an almost fairy-tale whimsy to many of them that gives the mapset a distinct, unifying character even as the map themes change and the tracks hop between a good handful of tones and genres. It's in the small, condensed autumn/winter episode from maps 16 to 19 that the rug pulls out from under you, and the complete lack of transition that makes it hit all the harder. The trauma here is based on at least one of the mappers' personal experiences, perhaps both, and the music speaks directly and urgently to the roughest of human emotions, with a musical philosophy that basically amounts to punching you in the stomach repeatedly to make sure you feel it. The extended final leg of the megawad, where you dwell in a deathly purgatory of dark halls and red abysses, features music that leans heavily into horror elements, along with hellish choirs, organs, and stabby metal guitars to underpin the theme.

Whispers of Satan was released in the same year as Plutonia 2, with the two of them together heralding the end of the Doom community's musical dead years, and it thrives on being more old-school than the many soundtracks that would follow after it in the lineage of Plutonia 2's composers. Both Corfiatis and Aro were already long-time veterans of Doom mapping with experience composing MIDIs, as well as writers and performers of electronic dance music out in the real world (Aro has been a DJ as well). Corfiatis's WoS-era tracks read as very Bobby Prince-inspired to me, elegant in simplicity and designed for building upon repetition, but with a surprising amount of musical knowledge underlying them. Aro's smaller number of tracks feel much more directly tied to his experience with electronica, heavy on beats and trance-like sounds—though probably his best-remembered track, the untitled one that appears in "Cryosleep," is to me less classifiable as a musical genre and is more a raw expression of emotion than anything. Both their styles are almost purely mood-driven, a (very unsurprisingly) perfect match for their own mapping styles and the way that the maps engage in storytelling as an emotive craft. The megawad's music is by turns haunting and harrowing, gripping and buoyant, sometimes so intense it hurts and sometimes just plain fun.

- @Not Jabba

Jenesis - Various Artists (2011)

Two years after Plutonia 2, the resurgence and revolution of Doom music was in full swing, though arguably it would still be a couple years before the new styles became truly cemented as a genre with the releases of Back to Saturn X. In 2011, Jimmy and stewboy had become the Mark Klem and Tolwyn of a new age, the go-to team forming the foundation of almost every major musical project, swiftly followed by then-newcomer PRIMEVAL. We could just as easily have given this award to Speed of Doom (2010) or Reverie (2011), or maybe even something a bit more left-field like Smart CTF (2011), or the later Resurgence (2014). Those years I just listed can give you a pretty good idea of how dense and enthusiastic the output of these few new composers was.

Jenesis is closest to my heart, though, and I think it also best represents the emerging ideas of 2010s Doom music, the metamorphosis out of '90s hard rock and simple atmospheric repetition and into the delicious pop-candy earworms of something more neo-nostalgically "video-gamey." Though Jenesis features a small number of tracks from 3D Realms games and other sources, as well as one track each by artists as diverse as The Green Herring, Paul Corfiatis, Xaser, Revenant, Jamie Robertson, Icytux, and ynxyg—all of which are great and add depth and variety to the overall soundtrack—the consistent driving force of the megawad's sound, and the whole music scene of the time, was the dynamic between Jimmy and stewboy.

Jimmy's tracks are fast-paced, full of vitality, and extremely catchy, even as they range in tone from the heavy industrial in "Pistons" to the intrepid and upbeat in "Pathogen" to the sinister and mysterious in "Sunset Over Babylon." In my head, I'm constantly comparing his music to the high-energy soundtracks that were so prevalent in SNES and Sega Genesis games, but some of his other influences are made explicit through his absolutely bangin' MIDI covers of "Undisclosed Desires" by Muse and "Crush" by Pendulum, which are legit some of the greatest highlights of the Jenesis soundtrack. In contrast, Stewboy's early music is more ethereal and laid-back, often contemplative but rarely mournful, whether it's conveyed through the chill guitar riffs of "River," the shimmering background instrumentals of "Sewer Chase," the high-fantasy epic vibe of "Cliff," the simultaneously funky and forlorn grooves of "In Space," or the hymnlike calm-before-the-storm of "The Greater Good." "Garden" is one of his best-known tracks of the era, a soft lullaby that lends an eerie atmosphere of peace and deathly quiet to its post-apocalyptic map. 

Neither artist can be summed up quite so easily, of course. Stewboy's "Rusty Bridge" is one of his most energetic pieces, a blood-pumping, constantly escalating track with the feel of high adventure. And my strongest memory of Jenesis will always be the molten gold of "Alchemy" (map 15) with its accompaniment of Jimmy's tranquil, gorgeous "Voyage I." To me, if there is any one defining trait of post-2010 Doom music, it's that ability to pivot effortlessly between the blazing energy of console shooters and the dreamlike beauty of soft electronica, between hammering metal and swaying ballad, or to just straight up blend them all into a single sound. It all started with Jenesis and other megawads of its time, and although the major composers of the era have evolved and refined their styles greatly in the years since (both Jimmy and stewboy went on to formally study music after Jenesis), the whole community has never ceased to benefit from their early work, and tracks like "Pistons," "Garden," and "Prototype" remain classics to this day.

- @Not Jabba

Unholy Realms - PRIMEVAL (2013)

Nowadays, the twice-Dootawarded PRIMEVAL is known for .OGG masterpieces ranging from ambient to metal, but in the early 2010s he was one of the community's most prolific MIDI composers. Of the "big three" composers at the time, his works were the most conventionally Doomy, which isn't really to say that they were backward-thinking; it's more that he took the riff-driven style of Mustaine, Prince, Doyle, and the like and evolved it to the next step. High-powered and with extremely memorable hooks, his tracks populated a good half-dozen of the most prominent megawads and mapsets in the first half of that decade, but Unholy Realms is his pre-Bastion magnum opus, as he composed the entire 35-track OST singlehandedly.

The very first map track, "On a Mission," captures much of his fundamental vibe right off the bat—with little more than a bassline and drums, and later a heavy, powerful droning laid on top of them, it's a track that you almost feel more than hear. But it's perfect for the dark, dingy underground techbase crawl it accompanies, and it makes you feel right at home as you settle into the IWAD-like run-and-gun of the early megawad. PRIMEVAL manages to create distinct sounds for the loose episode themes as you progress through the maps, perhaps dividing the megawad into more cohesive, identifiable legs than even the maps themselves do: old-school pastiche for the techbase maps (01-06); deep atmospheric pieces for the creepy interior maps (07-11); loud, exciting tracks, a rather unique combination of jauntiness and urgency, for the outdoor Plutonia maps (12-16); a more futuristic instrumentation for a return to fancier techbase (17); and then, as the mapset descends into a sort of pan-hellish sea of blood and lava and wood and gothic stone, an array of mostly hyper-intense metal pieces that amp the volume all the way up, punctuated occasionally by hyper-intense organs and hyper-intense grim marches and hyper-intense Heretic fantasy rock. Like its spiritual predecessors in the Scythe series, Unholy Realms relies on quick and hard-hitting maps all the way through, with a difficulty curve that rises steadily from beginning to end, and PRIMEVAL's soundtrack palpably embodies that rise in action. Along the way, the composer pays homage to some of his influences by remixing a handful of tracks from Doom and Heretic into heavily jacked-up versions of themselves that fit in easily among his many originals.

In short, however much the Unholy Realms OST throws subtlety out the window, it does so purely in the service of being awesome. Simple and straightforward as they may be compared to his recent work, PRIMEVAL's earlier tracks have a phenomenal energy that's all their own, and there's nowhere they could be more at home than they are in the fast-moving, classic-minded megawads he contributed them to.

- @Not Jabba

Back to Saturn X E1 and E2 - Various Artists (2013)

BTSX's original soundtrack has garnered widespread acclaim, loved by even those who weren't such big fans of the wad -- except, momentarily, by those sharing a particular sentiment that Doom MIDIs must lean aggressive and dark, falling into the categories of hard rock or metal or some other "appropriate" style. Infamous posts going on about this sentiment have led to some in-jokes and copypasta (one colorful description involving Mexican soap operas). But if you think about it for more than a moment, it makes little sense.

Because the original Doom and Doom 2 were conceived with a particular time and culture in mind, one steeped in punchy, brash rock music, and there is no reason to expect Back to Saturn X, which as a mapset loosely is an alt-universe "What if?" on the original game, to be wed to exactly the same cultural space. Rather than horror, grunge, militarism, and camp, BTSX is drenched in the wonder and melancholy of a far-off planet; it's a world where the liquids come in soft shades of purple and teal; instead of grunge, it has a certain luster. 

Which is where the restless, yearning MIDIs of esselfortium, the whimsical harmonies of stewboy, the hummable riffs of James Enclosure Jimmy Paddock, and the energetic drums and synths of Xaser -- along with one-offs by Darkhaven, sirjuddington, and TheGreenHerring -- fit the character of the series so well.

essel is capable of drawing from a bevy of genres including rock, film score, game music, jazz, various genres of electronic music, and, yes, definitely anime, to compose tracks that snugly fit whatever level she's writing for ... even if the bittersweet beginning of our journey in e1m1: Back to Saturn X Radio Report, where the cascading guitar arpeggios feel like heartbreak, is miles away in vibe from the crushing, trap-riddled ruins of e2m10: Eureka Signs, where the roiling cinematic score works its way from hopelessness to triumph. essel especially has a gift for song structure, with tracks that hover in the background of your play experience for a minute or two, accumulating tension, before plunging into a bridge or change-up that takes your breath away. Her work for the megawad's hub maps -- "Waiting," calm and synth-based, surrounding you like a warm haze; and "mystproj," whose peacefulness is clearly just the eye of the storm -- and that the megawad has these hub maps at all, also make it abundantly clear how much the music, as it is, is meant to be part of the experience.  

If I thought bass-and-guitar-driven rock wasn't quite my thing in Doom, then those thoughts would immediately abandon me when I listen to it in Jimmy's music, which grooves so catchily it's impossible not to love. The earliest example in the wad is "Atmospheric Pressure," with its driving rhythm section and dueling synths, which practically shoves you into the downhill momentum of e1m5: Total Exposure, mirroring the way the level's open lanes nudge you into dashes and sprints. stewboy's MIDIs have become more intimately associated with skillsaw's work in recent years, but his BTSX work is a portrait of an earlier stage of his evolution. The walking-up bass string motif in "Alien Jungle" feels like it's just as much a part of the opening vista of e2m1: Shadow Port as the lighthouse in the distance, like I'd hear it in my head if I played with all the sound off. And when Xaser is unleashed in the back half of the second episode, fiery and hard-hitting tracks like "Kashmoney Temple" (lol) and "Ominus" help evoke the more menacing, unhinged atmosphere that takes us to the finish line. 

BTSX MIDIs often have rich emotional palettes, two or three moods churning around each other within the space of 8 or 16 bars, as if reflecting some inner conflict trying to sort itself out. This ambivalence means that, regardless of what you're doing in-game -- scoping out what's coming up in silence, flitting around in the shadows around trying to stay unseen, taking on a big climatic fight, silently surveying the bloody aftermath of a battle -- the music could realistically complement it at that moment. 

The lead composers of BTSX trade in harmonic and emotional complexity in different ways, with styles that you would not mistake for each other, yet they have plenty in common at the broadest scale -- which all in all reads like an idealized description of the Back to Saturn X series itself. 

Part of the legacy of these composers -- along with others like Ribbiks, zan-zan-zawa-veia, and B.P.R.D. -- is that when I open up a wad made after the early '10s, which is about when people could stop relying predominantly on iwad MIDIs or tracks borrowed from other games if they wanted to, I almost expect it to be scored by music that is dreamy, soothing, emotionally ambiguous, playful, or experimental -- rather than a rock song cover or a more straightforward dirge. They did not introduce this leaning, but they sure helped to normalize it. The enduring influence is that background music, to get your map's vibe across, can be whatever you want it to be.

- @rd.

Plutonia Midi Pack - Various Artists (2013)

Part of the impetus for this retrospective on custom Doom music is the fact that there hasn’t been much recognition of the incredible compositions created by members of the community before the inaugural ‘Dootaward’ in 2020. For most of Doom modding history however, there simply weren’t a lot of musicians. For the first decade or so, if your project needed a custom soundtrack, one of just a handful of artists—probably David Shaw (Tolwyn) or Mark Klem—were able to provide that service, either that or you simply ripped midis of contemporary music from the internet. It was rare for most projects, including high profile releases, to include any custom music at all. This includes the official id Software release, Final Doom, of which only Evilution includes any new music. Thus, players of The Plutonia Experiment, the more compelling and better half of Final Doom (you know it’s true), were left to grind through chaingunners while listening to recycled tracks from prior commercial Doom releases.

“This will not stand” said James Paddock who, in 2011, had already released a midi pack for Harmony, now set out to lead one of the first major community midi packs to provide a full soundtrack for the remaining half of Final Doom. In the decades prior, finding musicians was a challenge because of the dearth of quality composers within the community, however Jimmy was able to assemble over a dozen talented musician to compose 32 brand-new songs to accompany every level of The Plutonia Experiment—some of whom would go on to become among the most celebrated musicians in community history. Tristan Clark, Bucket, Ribbiks and Stewboy are just a few of the names associated with the Plutonia Midi Pack who have gone on to compose countless unique songs for dozens of community projects. Every track perfectly accompanies the map it was designed for and some of them hit hard; I can’t imagine trying to replay Go 2 It without Plunge Saw blaring over the sound of incessant BFG blasts, and Blood Rush is a certified five flipper banger.

It’s not enough to acknowledge that this new generation of Doom musicians provided one of id Software’s official releases with the custom soundtrack it rightly deserved, it’s the impact the Plutonia Midi Pack had on music in the Doom community. Following its release, dozens and dozens of new (and old—holy shit, @leejacksonaudio?!) musicians began creating music for midi packs which would provide complete soundtracks for official and community releases from the past 20 years. In 2016, Thomas van der Velden’s Revolution! received a custom soundtrack followed by midi packs for The Master Levels, No Rest for the Living, Alien Vendetta and at least a half dozen more. The Plutonia Midi Pack ushered in an entire generation of Doom musicians and probably laid the foundation for the need to honor musical contributions in the Cacowards.

- @Scuba Steve

Going Down - mouldy (2014)

I was first introduced to Mouldy's music as a teenager back in the late 2000's, when I heard his track 'No More Memory' through a particular YouTube video. Something about the track just immediately grabbed me, and I put it onto whatever passed for an mp3 player in those days and kept listening to it. As someone whose musical exposure in childhood mostly consisted of opera singers, orchestras, and occasional 90's-era indie computer game music, the track was something entirely new to me. Constructed simply, but with plenty of detail to be found once you listened more closely, it had a slight aggression that was well balanced by a surprisingly emotional payoff - something often lacking in electronic music, because it's not that easy to do!

When 'Going Down' was released in 2014, I heard about the original soundtrack, and had to give it a listen, as I often do with these things. As soon as I got to MAP04, I thought 'This sounds familiar...' and was very excited when I discovered why.

Mouldy's midis have kept most of the characteristics of the music of his YouTube output - which you can bet I had been keeping a close eye on all these years. Although the sound design is inherently limited by the format, the tracks have lost none of the jazzy rhythms; and the harmonies, though occasionally a tad spicy for my tastes, show the kind of playful freewheeling that I would love to see more of in all art forms. The maps themselves are light-hearted yet deliberate, frenetic but not overwhelming, and the music is the same. There is always effort, thought, and detail on display. Mouldy knows when songs need a break, and knows how to avoid going so off the rails that the listener is completely lost - something I have seen some of my fellow composition students at uni struggle with! Moreover, although he breaks a lot of harmonic 'rules', he does so in a remarkably consistent way, and still gives the music the required punctuation and structure. My personal favourites include 'Robo-Zombie Mecha-Brain Boss Battle' (MAP10/27/32) and 'Running From The Jazz Robots' (MAP04/15).

The 'Jazz Robots' song, in particular, is probably one of the best examples of controlled chaos I've ever heard in music. The drum introduction is like a juggler leaping onto the stage before they start their act; they then show to the audience the objects they are about to use, and gradually start incorporating them into their routine. The themes of the piece are all given adequate playtime before they go crazy, and the listener always knows what they're listening for. The juggler's routines have individual buildups and climaxes, and there is so much colour on display that you can't help but marvel at it as it goes by.

In every art form, historical period, or movement, there are those who work within the conventions of the day, and there are those who reject them, or who are completely oblivious to them. Both of these types of creators are needed - the former, to explore existing waters in depth, and the latter, to find new waters entirely. I have no doubt that if Mouldy had created this megawad in 2004, he would have shown exactly as much disregard for the musical and mapmaking conventions of the time as he did in 2014. While I don't usually foray into pure jazz myself, I do occasionally spot some of his style in my own compositions, and when someone commented on a midi of mine from 2018 that they got 'cyriak vibes', I took that as high praise. I for one am honoured to be in the same community as Mouldy and I am looking forward to see what weird waters he discovers for us next!

- @stewboy

Realm of Parthoris - Alfonzo, Ilkallio, Tristan Clark, and Varis Alpha (2015)

Ninety-nine percent of people reading this probably have no idea what mapset I'm talking about. That's the story of Heretic—the small number of major annual releases being resoundingly welcomed by the game's dedicated fans but largely ignored and forgotten by everyone else. So it was with this small but polished community episode and its 10 out of 13 original musical tracks—to this day, about as close as anyone's ever come to a full OST in a Heretic WAD. But if you think you've never heard any tracks from Realm of Parthoris before, you're probably wrong. Many Doom mappers recognized genius when they saw it, and over time, the various pieces have quietly made their way into Doom releases as if by Elven magic: "Gutter Penny" in Mechadon's Formalhaut, "Saboteur" in Afterglow's Clock Out, "Oracle Night'' in CyanoBlugron's Unhallowed, and "The Occultist'' in Rayziik’s Judgment, to name a few. Because a good thing can't remain hidden forever, and that's part of the story of Heretic too.

Alfonzo's four tracks, which represent his best composing work, form the heart and backbone of the soundtrack. It's simply impossible to overstate how good these are; they're among the most beautiful MIDIs I've ever heard. Whether they lurk with sinister things in the most ancient shadows like "Gutter Penny" or soar on the winds of the gods like "Mystic Tides," they evoke the fantasy setting and the things I love about Heretic's world in the deepest way possible. The rest of the tracks in the OST more than keep up, though. Tristan Clark's "The Occultist" is a complex, elaborate journey, a majestic rising wave of force that's pluckily arcane but also metal as fuck, which explains why I've heard it over and over again in Doom maps released since Realm of Parthoris. The remaining four tracks (two each by Varis Alpha and Ilkallio) carry a distinctly "The Way Raven Did" vibe that fits their maps like a glove, perhaps foreshadowing the later Raven MIDI Pack (with "Crystal Embers" being probably my favorite Schilder-toned track ever).

Heretic has its own identity, and you can't just throw any old Doom track into your maps and expect it to work. That's why Heretic maps uniformly relied on the stock tracks for so many years, and why so many of the more recent releases use the Raven MIDI Pack. How do you craft a musical sound that feels distinctly like it was made for the game without just recycling Kevin Schilder's compositions? In 2015, Realm of Parthoris was probably the first project to tackle that question, and the answer absolutely rocks—so much so that we'll forgive them for using Lee Jackson's famous "Plasma" in the secret map, rather than adding another original track.

- @Not Jabba