Hello Nooklings, If you have been in this room with me for a while, you already know how I feel about digital perfection. It leaves me cold. You can play an album on Spotify and it sounds fine, and then you drop the needle on a vinyl record and your entire nervous system wakes up because there is actual physical friction in the room. When I started listening to the new score for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, I felt that exact friction. And even though I am terrible at video games (I haven’t properly played one since Tomb Raider on PC with a paper cheat-magazine open on my lap), this soundtrack pulled me straight into a story. Because it isn’t clean. It isn’t polite. Today in the Nook, I am sitting down with the man who built it: composer Stephen Lukach (Skull and Bones, Far Cry, Netflix’s Homicide, and early music-department roots on shows like HBO’s True Blood and Sneaky Pete). When you are scoring pirates, a pristine, mathematically perfect orchestra is a lie. Together with the audio team at Ubisoft, Stephen threw out the digital safety net. Instead of quantizing every note to a computer grid so it lands on the exact millisecond, he kept the loose first takes. He left the timing slightly off, so it actually feels like untrained, half-drunk sailors playing below deck. Halfway through our conversation, Stephen literally pulls a medieval hurdy-gurdy up to the microphone so we can hear the squeak of the wooden wheel and the clatter of the keys. He tells me about ordering a three-foot prototype “bass hurdy-gurdy” held together with wood, plexiglass, Velcro, and thick cello strings that kept snapping on him. He talks about taping up a cello he doesn’t technically know how to play just to get raw, unpolished notes, and why he refused to edit out the ugly mechanical clatter of his instruments in post-production—even when his own girlfriend hated the sound. We also get deeply nerdy about how sound hijacks the human nervous system. We talk about why the sudden silence of the engines in Titanic or the quiet of the bomb in Oppenheimer makes your heart rate spike, how a 3-minute piece of music gets broken into twenty stems so a player can sit in stealth mode for half an hour, and how a remote computer glitch accidentally created the terrifying predator click for his upcoming Amazon snake thriller, Beware Boiúna. And right at the end, when I ask him my favorite question—why he still wakes up every day to tell stories—he gives me an answer about Homo sapiens, bands of fifty monkeys, and why shared myths are the only reason human beings ever learned to trust a stranger. Pour yourself a proper cup of Earl Grey, put your headphones on, and come sit with us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thetaletellersnook.substack.com
