Anything by Celldweller goes well with EP. I also highly recommend ES Posthumus

Other bands I would recommend, Powerman5000 Apocalyptica The Prodigy Unkle Rob Zombie Juno Reactor

Really loving things like Frontline Assembly, VNVnation, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_on_Magnetic_Tape]Bass Communion[/url] might be a bit too down tempo. Liking some early Jean Michel Jarre LPs like, Magnetic Fields, Equinoxe, and a bit later Rendezvous. A Zoolook track 'Ethnicolor' was sampled and used on an old 16-bit (atari & amiga) game called 'Captain Blood'. It still evokes the idea of moving in space and meeting alien entities (well, for me anyway). Meat Beat Manifesto is also another favourite. There's a great compilation out there somewhere called [url=http://www.discogs.com/Various-Future-Pop-01-The-Best-Of-Modern-Electron... Pop[/url] (lame-names 'r' us).

Well I'll add my little grain of salt :) Some of the music I've been listening to a lot the past few years is an austrian futurepop group named [url=http://www.deezer.com/en/music/mind-in-a-box]mind.in.a.box[/url]. It's kind of a fusion of prog. trance and EBM with a noir cyberpunk theme. I find it is perfect for reading Eclipse Phase stuff :). I wouldn't necessarily use it all for a roleplaying session though. You'd have to sort through it as everyone has different tastes :D Mel.

Anything by Dub FX really. I can imagine the autonomist habs rocking with his dub... :D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhBoR_tgXCI&feature=fvst What's special about this guy is that all the sounds you hear have been created with his voice using a Roland Effects & loop pedal (except for the saxophone, of course). And it sounds...awesome! I guess that an artist like that would be extra popular in post-Fall!

Apparently not. Or this one was extra sneaky!

Continuing the music trip, I had a revelation while listening to some Future Sound of London on the way to work this morning :) May I suggest the following albums: - FSOL - Lifeforms - FSOL - ISDN They're not dark stuff, but they really are space and trippy and should perfectly set the mood for alien worlds and brinker spaceships. Mel.

Some classical stuff fits pretty well with the emptiness of space ... Gustav Holtz: The Planets -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets

http://web.me.com/digitaltaokatakashi/digitaltaokatakshi/data.html The introduction of the "2008 live act" is some slightly glitched/processed classical choral singing. I think it would fit really nice for some space/futuristic ambiance.

I just came across the Akira movie soundtrack again, and several songs are obviously good for EP. An eclectic mixture of synths, gamelan, Japanese drums and choirs, often with very vast and fateful moods. Requiem is perfect for EP - a zoom into a solar system ravaged by the Fall. Jonathan Coulton of course has a lot of fun songs that might be introduced for a bit of levity. http://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/downloads/ "Still Alive" is of course the theme music for any seed AGI. "Better" is about relationship problems with an exhuman. "DNA" - fun biotech. "I Feel Fantastic" - enhancer drugs.

I mastered my first EP game yesterday and tried a few things for the background music. - The Koyaanisqatsi theme works really well to force a heavy gloomy mood - "Mars, the bringer of war", from Gustav Holtz's "planets" is great to get some stress when things are turning bad. - and of course, "thus spoke zarathustra" when floating in space

The music from System Shock 2 is incredible. All of the games themes fit in perfectly with EP and the entire soundtrack is incredibly creepy. Eric Brosius, the composer, created a full CD quality copy of the original music. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SOO1EQJO It's sick.

jiyunatori wrote:

Some classical stuff fits pretty well with the emptiness of space ... Gustav Holst: The Planets -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets

Isao Tomita's interpretation is especially appropriate.

Here are some soundtracks that frequently come up on the playlist during gaming. Neotokyo OST - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9QgaUPypzo Mass Effect 1 & 2 OSTs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POHscfRZty8 Stand Alone Complex - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WXx5hAiNY

Check out Burial, dark trippy dubstep / UK garage. www.myspace.com/burialuk

Solar Fields: See this amateur animated youtube video to Water Silence with awesome design for interior of O'Neill habitat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC_ToUWceGw

There is an instruction on how to create such ambient tracks yourself: http://lifehacker.com/5615442/how-to-create-your-own-slowed+down-ambient... This memes started after Bieber 800xslower ambient track, quite good one I would say. RPG.net thread has also some interesting tracks done by this method: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=531991&page=5

I started slowing Holst The Planets and results are magnificent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets

Some of the tracks from the Metroid series are quite appropriate. You could even have the Metroid creatures themselves as some sort of bioengineered species of TITAN origin, hungering for the electricity inside of the nervous systems of living things Welcome to a remote research facility - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NoEvgpvDQc Welcome to Earth? - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtLWUkAqQBM Ship taken over by exsurgents? - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykpnOty7wsk

I haven't run a game yet, but I've been putting together a list of music based upon what I've got in my collection. Much of it has already been mentioned, but I'll include it all for completeness' sake. EVE Online Deus Ex System Shock 2 Metroid Prime 1/2/3 Doctor Who soundtracks (some of the quieter tracks) Half-Life 1/2/Episodes 1+2 Ghost In The Shell Fringe OST Firefly OST Mirror's Edge The X-Files Second Sight Yeah... a good 75% of my music collection is video game soundtracks. I suppose the theme I'm going for here is quiet, ominous, suspenseful instrumentals. Got some tenser techno tracks in there too, would work well for battles.

Haven't seen the Tron:Legacy film, but I recently found this remix of Derezzed by Daft Punk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSJtUKAwJXU I imagine a very 'HI-NRG' combat scenario unfolding.

The Doctor wrote:

The whole [u]Tron Legacy[/u] soundtrack would be ideal for Eclipse Phase.

Yup. I have been using it and the Social Network soundtrack as background music for a salvage ops/haunted house adventure, and am very happy with them. Philip Glass is another good background source, "The Fog of War" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" might be useful for EP.

I used background music for a Delta Green campaign, and I found two tracks effective in play. Both of them seem appropriate for Eclipse Phase. 1) Front Line Assembly - Implode - (1999). "Don't Trust Anyone." "Don't trust anyone. Don't trust anyone. Don't trust anyone. Don't trust anyone. Don't trust anyone." I used this as the closing song for each session of that Delta Green game. It has only those five lines, and worked very nicely despite its lyrics. Delta Green named in-game an illegal cell-based conspiracy within the American Federal government. It has some parallels with Firewall in E.P. 2) Peter Gabriel - The Last Temptation of Christ OST - (1988). "Gethsemane." This particular song played as the background when the players watched from hiding as a group of aliens vivisected a captured human. Its slow, atonal, call-and-answer sweeps nicely emphasized the steady determined surgical work of the extraterrestrials. The long rests gave the players a sense of tension that matched their characters silent terror. It looped nicely, too. In E.Pl, one can use it to emphasize the same effect: something horrifying and alien and shocking. --- I generally don't use songs with lyrics as gaming background music, but I've found using loops from theme-appropriate songs as leitmotifs for NPCs very satisfying. Players asked why I did that, and I told them :if it was good enough for Wagner, it was good enough for me." One person disliked opera and groaned, but every one else liked it well enough when I said "it was also good enough for Aeon Flux." Examples from actual play follow. 1) Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason - (1987). "The Dogs of War" I used a loop this of track's opening bars as the leitmotif for enemy agents in the aforementioned campaign, starting with their minor appearance in the first adventure, again in the near-lethal ending of the second adventure, and finally with their major role in the fourth adventure. This worked very well, since players knew that horrifying cello lick indicated trouble, even if they didn't know who the agents were. It did take three or four encounters before they got scared by the loop. 2) William Orbit - Strange Cargo III - (1993). "Best Friend, Paranoia" I used this song's hook as the leitmotif for a friendly NPC. I've not yet come up with any leitmotifs for E.P..

Two things I'm surprised havent been posted yet... First, the ambient album "AI Awakens" by Chris Armstrong, essentially a series of ambient tunes that chart the progress of a nanobot swarm linking into a single AI and moving towards singularity. Pretty pertinent right? http://www.spaceagefurnituremusic.com/index.html Second... no-one has mentioned Tangerine Dream?