The myth goes like this: in 2014, Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima was studying the landscape in Iceland. He was tweeting pictures of moss. Frosted green blankets, lava fields below. Kojima was thinking about how Iceland looks like a planet that’s just been born.

While he was there, he visited a record store. He was in line to pay when he heard a song playing over the speakers. Textured, a beat like morse code, a voice harmonising with itself, something scratching, and strings being plucked. He asked who it was and the shop gave him 0, the new album from Low Roar.

Fronted by Ryan Karazija, who had not long relocated from California, he made his first record in the kitchen between 12 hour night shifts at a recycling factory. He made the next one in his garage between 12 hour days shifts. Little did he know that while he worked, one of the most famous game designers in the world was on a flight back to Japan listening to his music on repeat.

So one day, Ryan gets a message from Sony. They want to license a song off the album, though they can’t say what it’s for. Ryan says, yeah, whatever. The fee will pay him back for the cost of making the record. In 2016, he’s on the couch when he gets a message from a friend excited that a Low Roar song has been used in the first trailer for the new, long-awaited Kojima game. The game was called Death Stranding and it looked like it was set in a place just born.

By the time it came out in 2019, the two men had built a relationship. Almost every song off of Ryan’s next album featured in the game and his garage was flooded with new fans. I poured in with them.

Because this game was big-budget, cinematic, technically groundbreaking, full of mo-capped celebrities, and it told a story totally lost in its own surrealism. But the music was a quiet little call out of the dark that asked, hey, are you still awake. It caught me off-guard. Put a tender scale over everything. Yeah, they were songs like sad conversations in bed, long pauses, and it’s nearly morning now, and we have to make our minds up before we fall asleep.

I would walk down the game’s volcanic beaches and the camera would pan out, UI would drop, and it was like I was walking in a music video while Low Roar rearranged the atmosphere. I was crawling under wind chimes. Sleeping near the computer where it’s warm. It was the music of a scared animal, but that sound was echoing through something bigger, like the vault of a church. And in that echo, there’s some distance wrenched between us, and isn’t it sad how sometimes we have to say goodbye to each other and just go it alone.

Delirious, housebound in my first year of Long Covid, I booked tickets to see Low Roar. They were due to play in a café in Manchester in October 2021. But I got an email saying the gig had been moved to April, and I thought, good, buys me more time to recover. Then another email arrived. It had been postponed til November, and I felt the same again. But I never got to see them live because Ryan died that October. Complications from pneumonia, aged 40.

I felt this misplaced sadness for someone I didn’t know. Hated to think he might have suffered. Thought about this game he was attached to. Its story is all about death and community, and community in spite of death. Went online to see tributes from Kojima, players, fans. People lighting candles. I ordered a few vinyls and played Low Roar in the living room, knowing it wasn’t the same.

When any artist dies, part of the grief is knowing there’s no more art to come. That way, it’s like two deaths in one.

The second Death Stranding game came out this year, and afterwards, an international symphony tour was announced with one single date in the UK. On Sunday, I met up with two Internet friends for the first time even though we’ve known each for years. Connected over games during the pandemic — community in spite of death.

While I waited for them to arrive, I watched kids in cosplay outside Wetherspoons. One of them was dressed not as the game’s characters but as Hideo Kojima himself. Glasses, haircut, blazer. I laughed. Totally forgot people would dress up, but I hadn’t really thought much about the concert to be honest. My own health is all I have capacity for. I’m doing a cardiology rehab programme five days a week that’s going well, but only because I’m letting it take over my life the way it needs to. Five years later and I’m still not out of the woods.

I guess I assumed there’d be an orchestra on stage? They’d play the score and I’d enjoy it. A victory lap, an excuse to sell merch. I was only partly right. London Metropolitan Orchestra convened under a big screen that played footage from both games, but before we heard the instrumentals and all the Woodkid on game two, we got a setlist front-loaded with songs by Low Roar. His recorded vocals played, and then later singer Matt Kent played the part. And god, it was like —

All those quiet songs I knew, soft like the inside of a cheek, were arranged across 80 instruments and now his voice came to us atop a castle. Pauses in the music were filled with new movements, directions. The songs were stretched around a bigger architecture. There were pillars and pathways and waterfalls so that each song had so much more space. Became a whole city. I don’t know how else to put it except to say: it’s like, if the music from him, and him alone, was someone making a promise, on stage with the backing of an orchestra, he was telling the truth.

I was so happy, and sad. Tears dripped off my face. There was a tribute on screen, and then later, they played an interview with Hideo Kojima about what it means to tour this music. It was in the Sydney Opera House the week before, Los Angeles the week after (and, I thought, had been with this man in California before he moved to Iceland, before his ideas were taken back to Japan). In the clip, Kojima said this one thing I had to get my phone out quickly to write down: ‘I don’t like the idea that music only exists in a virtual space.’

I thought virtual space was the only portal I had remaining if I ever wanted to access that sound again. But on Sunday, I went to the Low Roar gig I never got to see in 2021. The music was no longer virtual; the orchestra built it in space. And I take those ideas back to Liverpool with me, of making a place out of sound, and coming together to enter that space, and knowing I was wrong — that art lives on. I hope all artists find caretakers like Kojima found Low Roar.

🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌

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