By Alex Pentaliotis

The Wasteland Series began with a broad creative challenge: to build a complete world around the aftermath of collapse.

Once the concept was in place, it was a matter of delving deeper, because we wanted to encapsulate the post-apocalypse beyond just a series of Foley and SFX elements you would hear when exploring that world. What would the defining emotions and feelings be of a world that has undergone collapse, and how could that translate to audio?

One of the overriding feelings was “pressure”, and this can exist in both active and passive circumstances. If you are running through a collapsing city on fire, that same pressure can also be felt by an individual making their way through a scorched, blasted, but desolate wasteland.

The library itself contains over 1,400 samples. To give a couple of categories as examples, the Wasteland Ambiences are more atmospheric, designed to loom over any setting with a sense of foreboding, built with layers of recorded and synthesised material. The Pressure Texture ambiences are a more direct representation of that concept, with a relentless, grinding intensity, more machine-like and immediate.

Whilst these required a lot of work to ensure we captured the essence of the world portrayed by The Wasteland Series, I have found myself using them in non-apocalyptic projects, where they suited the emotion of the moment rather than the visual spectacle. Having also heard similar feedback from others who have used The Wasteland Series across a variety of projects, this confirmed that we were able to capture not just the sound of the world, but the underlying emotional resonance we sought to convey.