‘Trauma is messy, but music will come of it': Jessica Curry on her new album, Shielding Songs

The Guardian

11 hours ago

For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory – if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That's not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse.
'Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,' she says. 'I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn't writing music, I wasn't even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear it. I'm still trying to work out what that rejection was about – I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn't even feeding or dressing myself.'
One day last year, however, Curry made the decision to start listening to her music again. Not yet ready to compose, she began cataloguing her work instead, putting it in some sort of order after years of manic productivity. The result is Shielding Songs, an album mostly made up of new versions of her favourite pieces, arranged as lusciously ethereal choral works featuring the acclaimed London Voices choir. 'Shielding Songs is a kind of gathering together, almost like a manifesto. I was thinking, what do I believe as a composer? What is my legacy? And I have to say, I did think it was going to be the last thing I would put out. And I was like, if it is going to be the last thing, I want it to be good. And I want it to say the things that I feel are important.'
Among them are four pieces from Everything's Gone to the Rapture, a game about the apocalypse from the point of view of a tiny English village that won Curry a Bafta for her soundtrack. Created by developer The Chinese Room, of which Curry and her husband Dan Pinchbeck were co-founders, it drew praise for its lavish bucolic setting and highly emotional score, heavily inspired by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. It has been some of her most popular music.
'I still get emails about it 10 years later,' she says. 'So many people have Rapture tattoos – I often get emails that say, I only listen to death metal, but I love this soundtrack. That game has stuck with people, but I wanted to reimagine the music. The Mourning Tree is not the most played track on the score, but it's the one that people write to me about. Lots of people have played it at funerals. And I thought, there is something beautiful I can do with a purely choral arrangement here.'
Another reason Rapture is so prominent on the new album is the parallel between its story of growing isolation at the end of the world and the experience of the Covid years. 'The game is about what it means to be human, what does it mean to love?' she says. 'And interestingly it has a lot of tie-in with a global event like a pandemic and how we cope with that.' Curry has described Shielding Songs as an exploration of what it means to love and grieve in isolation, but it is also a hopeful study of human endurance. Four of the tracks come from her anti-war requiem Perpetual Light, first performed in 2011 – a response to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, undercut with a sense of hope for the future.
A piece from Chinese Room's VR sci-fi adventure So Let Us Melt is included too. The titular track is a wilting choral work inspired by John Donne, but the other tracks on the score are more experimental and hint at where she is heading musically. 'You can tell it's mine, but it's a kind of weird mix of Baba O'Riley with minimalism, with a classical bent, but it also sounds like it's from a film,' Curry says. 'It's got that sort of epic space opera feel, and everything for me coalesced into that score. I loved the sound.'
Curry and Pinchbeck (to whom one beautiful new song on the album, Rest With Your Dream, is dedicated) sold The Chinese Room to Sumo Digital in 2018; Curry departed, Pinchbeck stayed on as creative director, overseeing Bafta-winning oil rig horror adventure, Still Wakes the Deep, but left in 2023. Now the duo have formed a small new studio, and are working on fresh concepts. 'Maybe we're insane,' she says. 'But I think we are good at making games, me and Dan. We have things to say.' Curry is still sick, and she still worries about going out, especially now that some people have become aggressive toward those who wear protective masks. But she is composing again.
'This is the first time in a long time that I can hear music properly, in my head,' she says. 'I didn't think it would happen again, and I think it is going to be something new. It will be Jessica Curry, but I'm not the same person that I was. When really bad things happen to you, you don't go back. The ground doesn't just solidify again. Trauma is messy and it's exhausting, but music will come from it.'
Shielding Songs is out now via Bandcamp