Adam Drucker (Doseone) reflects on key events leading up to the publication of the Enter the Gungeon soundtrack and Heart in Halves EP.
By Jerry Jeriaska of The Ongaku
The unpredictable nature of the Doseone discography extends to the musician's singing voice, which transforms according to the needs of each new album. Like a cast of memorable characters in a story-driven video game, his songs feature rap vocals of differing pitch, rhythm and personality, all voiced by the composer.
In this look back at some pivotal career milestones, the musician offers insights into how his formula-defying music emerged on stage while participating in live rap battles. Equally defining, his immersion in Japan's earliest generation of console gaming and live tours overseas inspired the American musician to dive headfirst into independent games creation.
Enter The Gungeon: Heart In Halves EP pressed on deluxe 180-gram vinyl
Lost in Jersey - Tape Trading Origins
Tracing back Adam Drucker's origins as prolific game composer Doseone, we find ourselves transported to a neighborhood in New Jersey in the early 1980's. For kids of his generation, trading media meant hunting down physical objects and exchanging them by hand.
"And you couldn't really duplicate Kid Icarus," he points out. "So those trades were like you could hold it for a bit. If someone really didn't like it and you had a game you didn't like, you would do a hard trade, no take-backs."
He recalls as a nine-year old the plastic rectangular cartridges, housing genres of software from adventure fantasies to sports simulators, offered a means of being "basically transported" into the imagination. The effect was so potent that he found himself staying up until two in the morning playing The Legend of Zelda, "and just being, like, 'What just happened?'"
The immersive tug of the gameplay was deep enough to compensate for the technological limitations of the 8-bit hardware. Adam recalls keeping season stats with friends on little league score sheets, tabulating strikeouts and ERAs, between innings of SNK Corporation's Baseball Stars.
"Metroid is cool as hell and weird and has unconventional compositions or it's just one tone," he says of the NES sound chip. "And I think what those games definitely started for me was being a collector. I'm obsessive about having things, and lining them up. I love it! It's one of my favorite things."
For the neighborhood kids who "didn't have a lot of money growing up," trading cartridges became a compulsive, risky endeavor. "It gave me money anxiety," Adam recalls, "and I didn't even know what that was. You know what I mean? But it was this feeling of inadequacy that is defined by objects you can or cannot have in your life. And that was actually super pivotal.
"That's the negative side. The good side was we would play these games and just get immersed and lost."
Anticon Tours - Exiting the Comfort Zone
For tape traders, tracing back the early era of the Doseone discography leads us to Cincinnati, 1997. Appearing onstage with Eminem at Scribble Jam, a local hip hop festival, Adam participated in diss-driven competitive bouts. An audience grew around the esoteric vibe and wide-ranging lexicon of "Dose," observing his on-stage persona engaging in combat against creative stagnation.
"Something that exists in the art of battle rap is that concept of being spontaneous," he says of the freestyling skills he now teaches to kids in Santa Fe. "Moving fast, surprising myself. Also being a staunch editor—in the way that healthy, aggressive competition makes you be."
"There's something else that kicks in within that competitive environment for some people," he observed. "It's survival-meets-spontaneity and it's a really great space."
Coinciding with the release of the first Doseone solo album Hemispheres in 1998, Adam co-founded a record label based in Los Angeles. Dubbed 'Anticon', the partnership provided a pathway for independent artists to perform and publish music. "Major labels didn't want us because we were doing something different," he says. "We had to do it ourselves."
Hemispheres, the very first album by Doseone
Anticon sought out more experienced self-taught artists who had been performing in the Bay Area for over a decade. There, Adam befriended Dax Pierson, leading into the formation of the Oakland hip-hop band Subtle. "I started to learn from all of them," he says. "I found out probably my greatest talent is being an inspired sponge or mimic. I would absorb—never steal—their talents that stood out to me, and attempted them on my own until I no longer sucked at them."
As online message boards dedicated to tape-trading outside the USA began tracking Anticon's emergence as an influential label, Adam reconnected with the gaming hardware that captured his imagination in his formative years.
"When I lived in Oakland, I would go to the swap meet and look at all these Nintendo and Sega consoles and they're ten bucks," he says. "I was like, 'With about 150 bucks I could fulfill my childhood dream of having every single console.' And so I did."
Anticon came on the radar of DJ Krush, a pioneer of Japanese hip-hop, who viewed Doseone as something of a West Coast counterpart. "DJ Krush kind of fell in love with us early because he makes progressive rap," Adam says. "So he wanted us brought us over, and of course we said yes. And we went over and man, it was insane."
Having never traveled from Jersey north of the American side of Niagara Falls, the Anticon-era tours signified a turning point for Adam's creative opportunities. "One time we were brought out by [PixelJunk Eden composer] Baiyon," he recalls. "Before he was a musician—he was still a student—he made music and was a visual artist. And he brought us out to his college to play a show with Charles Hayward, who is the drummer and vocalist of This Heat. And This Heat is one of my favorite bands in the history of time and space."
"I do incredibly complex, poetic, fast rapping, and [the audience in] Japan was absorbing it all and screaming and totally into it. They pushed past the language barrier, directly into the feeling, and had the best possible reaction. It was life-affirming."
Sweating the Details - Enter the Gungeon
Samurai Gunn EP published in association with the Bushido brawler TeknoPants
The first Doseone game soundtrack went live on Bandcamp in December of 2013, following a year of development with programmer Beau Blyth, also known as TeknoPants. Designed in the GameMaker engine, Samurai Gunn earned an Excellence in Design nomination at the Game Developers Conference's annual Independent Games Festival.
The broadcasters at Giant Bomb invited the up-and-coming indie game composer, together with Cards Against Humanity co-founder Max Temkin, to attended a livestream at the following year's press event in San Francisco. "It was at GDC," Adam recalls. "I set my gear up to perform the Samurai Gunn rap live. And there's two dudes in the audience, Dave [Rubel] and Brent [Sodman] of Dodge Roll, who were super quiet and didn't know anyone there.
"And I guess in the room, you couldn't hear my music during the performance. It only went out on the livestream. So it was all these people in a small room with me screaming at the top of my lungs for three minutes. And when I perform, I sweat so much. So I'm dripping in sweat! They're just in this quiet room with me being like, 'Samurai!!!' at the top of my lungs. I'm bright red.
"When I stopped, there was sort of a strange energy in the room. I see Dave and Brent and they just have their eyes wide open. It was kind of awkward."
Samurai Gunn live performance, via Giant Bomb
As the confusion subsided, Adam struck up a conversation with the two developers seated nearby. They had worked on the design of Mythic Entertainment's Dungeon Keeper, though it remained to be seen whether they would stay on at the Electronic Arts subsidiary.
“We love watching [rap] battles," Adam was surprised to hear. "We're both getting fired from EA and we're going to make a game. We're going to call you.”
Dodge Roll formally began development on Enter the Gungeon that year and Adam was asked to score the opening cinematic. "I spent a month just really focusing on making the title track something special," he says. "And then I played it for them, and they were like, 'This sounds great! I don't know what you're saying, but it sounds great!'"
Having previously been introduced to Gungeon's roguelike mechanics by Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, Adam was intrigued by the randomization of level design and enemy placement: "It's the same video game, and I can get better at it, but everything changes?' It's so cool! And then for the music not to change when I can participate in that, [would] drive me a little batty."
Exit The Gungeon Original Soundtrack, written, recorded and produced by doseone
Adam insisted on composing a hefty volume of music, allowing for the sound design to be as varied and unpredictable as the roguelike elements: "Immediately, I was like, 'All right, so these need to be four-minute pieces.'
"Even if you play a level for one minute, that means you'll never hear the same thing twice, even if you don't press pause. And then we need two pieces of music for every zone and they switch as you kick a door open every once in a while—not every time, but a little bit of [ramdom number generation].”
With the visual design of Enter the Gungeon, Dodge Roll made copious use of homage, keeping players guessing which popular culture references might pop up next. Players scoured the maps for easter eggs hidden deep in the endgame and in largely unexplored corners. "Gungeon is this pastiche of so many humorous sensibilities, such as nods to great games and great films," Adam points out. "It's an amazing space for sound-alikes."
Citing one example, an unlockable Gungeoneer simply named "The Robot" serves as a send-up of a popular 1980's action film, replete with iconic percussive elements. Adam's background as an "inspired sponge" of the tape-trading and sampling scene allowed him to lean into the memetic exercise of the parody. "Fortunately with stuff like that you can't get sued for it. That’s what hip-hop has given us. You can get sued for intact melodies, but you can't get sued for drums."
Incorporating Lyrical Styles with Heart in Halves
Heart in Halves, released on vinyl by Laced Records in 2016
All that remained was blending the transitions on the soundtrack album and recording "vox," or vocal snippets like "oohs" and "ahs." The vocal elements alluded to Doseone's background in hip-hop and added an element of surreality to the sound design. "Sometimes vocals break a sort of invisible fourth wall of feeling like the game is having a voice," Adam observes. "And so there's a fine line that I have to walk between the vocals being cool and part of the music. It can't be such that it feels like it's trying to speak to you."
Succeeding a volume of records published since the Anticon days, the Gungeon soundtrack album benefitted from a thought-out methodology. One track would lead right into the next without a fadeout, treating the listener to a continuous listening experience without abrupt stops and starts. "For me, every aspect is an avenue to be a little bit more creative, so when I take all the finished songs, all of my soundtracks are blended. They're organized with a hint of how they appear to you in game, and also being in a relative key between songs, so you don't get anything that clashes."
With a two-year development cycle drawing to a close, indie game enthusiasts began catching up with the Doseone discography in anticipation of launch. It signaled an opportunity for a crossover, prompting Adam to begin work on an album tying lyrics into arrangements of selected tracks. He ruled out boss battles that accommodated little space for vocals to operate. The underlying motivation was: "These would be fun things to say in your head while you shoot the Bullet Kin.'”
"When I made the Heart in Halves title track 'Enter the Gungeon', the game was finished and all the assets were created. I got a full list of all the guns, and I'm singing all these different ridiculous gun raps for the verses. I did that, and it felt good, and I had more gas."
In step with the Doseone discography, the vocals on Heart in Halves varied in tempo, mood, rhythm, and intonation. The "character" of the performance fit the needs of the song, unconstrained by some preconceived notion of Doseone's pubic-facing personality.
Adam puts it this way: "For me, it's about altering my voice to capture different intensities and textures. When I select a different tone, it's because the music was asking for it. That's the skill I love, and that's the boundary that I try to always push.
"To listen to my Doseone music that I've done in the last ten years, there is a ton of that. I sound like five different people. And so, Heart in Halves, because I knew that no one would really know who I was as a rapper, it's a perfect place to just sound like slightly different versions of myself and have fun with that freedom."
Sludge Life Original Soundtrack, art by Terri Vellmann & Doseone
Going forward, Adam views recording lyrics and writing dialog as two areas of the game development pipeline where he has room to expand. "When it came to Sludge Life, Terri Vellmann is totally self-taught and an outsider as well," he says. "We wanted to do a game that's full of dialog. Doing funny and poetic, dark, well-written urban dialog that is not story-driven, necessarily, I really excel at."
Inhabiting different vocal personalities on songs and coming up with dialog for in-game characters shared a number of creative impulses. "It's sort of a layered flex, where lyrics are part of the flex, saying interesting things, saying unpredictable things, saying things that make sense to you, that are catchy, that rhyme. And then the added flex is having fun with how that sounds and what I do with my voice. So for me, that keeps me engaged."
"Now I'm trying to help with some more story-driven stuff, because I do understand that with all the video games I've played and the access I've had to observing how narratives are constructed. So I'm starting to do that, and I'm invited to by Terri and all my other friends."
(Currently sold out) Enter the Gungeon Deluxe Anniversary Edition vinyl.
Adam Drucker (Doseone) is a composer and frequent collaborator of Devolver Digital – www.doseone.xyz | Spotify Artist Page | x.com/doseone