Dynamedion worked on the third bonus mission with our favorite agent 47.
The creators of HITMAN (SQUARE ENIX / IO INTERACTIVE) released their third bonus mission titled „Landslide“ with additional music composition, music production, lyric writing and vocal recordings by Dynamedion.
After our last blog post highlighting our work for the Bangkok episode (click here to learn more), the “Landslide” Bonus episode takes us back to Sapienza (Italia).
The three songs performed by virtual band “The Class” in the Bangkok episode (“Are We Stars” • “Shine A Light” • “Gun Show”) were written by our Senior Sound Designer and Project Manager Felix Diekhake and produced by Christian Hartung.
For “Landslide”, Felix had the pleasure to compose three songs together with Dynamedion’s lead composer Tilman Sillescu, who also accounts for the music production and vocal recordings. It is always exciting to plunge into new cultures and compose country-specific tracks to see them come to life.
“Landslide” takes you back to Sapienza where locals have gathered for the Festival del Paese. Your target is Marco Abbiati, a wealthy businessman-turned-politician who is returning to his hometown to run for mayor. Now it’s time to choose: whether to use brute force or orchestrate a genuine masterpiece of assassination to checkmate your subject.
The early evening event in the piazza is attended by an Italian band. Conny Kollet lends her beautiful voice to the band’s lead singer as you can hear in the video below. Now, Felix and Conny give us some deep insights into our work:
“As avid readers of our website know, we did a lot of custom tracks for HITMAN, among them tracks for “THE CLASS” (Bangkok episode), Moroccan HipHop and Pop for the Marrakesh episode (plus a bit of Swedish baroque), house music for a fashion show in Paris and uplifting J-Pop to jump around to on a dance pad in a mountaintop hospital on Hokkaido.
Some of the first music we ever did for HITMAN however is only just now being released: three Italian pop tracks written by Tilman Sillescu and yours truly featuring vocals by the wonderful Conny Kollet will provide the musical entertainment at the Sapienza Festival del Paese in the “Landslide” bonus episode – so now we know why they asked us to arrange the tracks to sound like a live band with keyboard drum track 🙂
Writing these tracks was huge fun. We listened to a lot of 70s and 80s Italian music to get in the mood: Adriano Celentano, Patty Pravo, Biagio Antonacci etc.… lots of beautiful melodies that stick in my head to this day.
What I enjoyed most was that the assignment allowed us to be totally unabashed about becoming a *ahum* little corny here and there – or rather, to pull out all the stops on kitsch.
I sketched out rough versions of the tracks that were already laden with every wonderful pop cliché I could think of, then I handed them over to Tilman to improve the song writing and arrangement and do the final production – and he went and sprinkled on even more cliché beauty. The 1980s have left more of an impression on us than I thought, it seems… we alternated between ‘Man, this is beautiful’ and falling over laughing.
Once we had the tracks and lyrics down we brought in Conny, who is both a trained classical singer (as evidenced in a huge number of game soundtracks from Dynamedion) and a skilled live artist in her own right. She really channeled her inner Diva on these tracks and she interpreted them with tremendous energy and impeccable feeling. I absolutely love the final result and I can’t wait to walk through sunny Sapienza with our tracks blasting over the PA.
By the way: two other Italian tracks we wrote, featuring the great Salvino, were already used in the original Sapienza episode – if you’ve missed out on assassinating people to the sound of 80s Italian pop so far, be sure to check it out.”
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Felix Diekhake
“I really enjoyed working on these songs and it was great to sing Italian again. Felix and Tilman did a great groundwork, so the cooperation with the two of them was funny and constructive. Although the songs are a little bit cheesy, I really love to listen to them again and again.”
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Conny Kollet
Enjoy watching the Reveal Trailer of the latest bonus mission “Landslide” with vocals by Conny Kollet:
