Oasis Effect is a project dedicated to video game music, my first love as a creator. If it weren’t for these soundtracks, I might not become a musician at all — not to the extent of committing my life to it. OE is my “love letter” to this music, the musicians who make it, their creative teams, all the human and nonhuman beings inspiring the stories those team tell, the fans of those stories, the fans so inspired by those stories that they write fanfictions and write fandom wikis and tinker apart cartridges and live inside game file data and livestream right when sequels drop and livestream well after, and all the countless fans so moved and molded by these stories that they become dreamers — sometimes dreaming of those stories and worlds more deeply than the people who created them. They all made me an artist. And all of them hum soundtrack music.

OE is born from 16 years of wishing and wondering what a project like this could look and sound like, and then 14 months of getting to work — 100 pages a month, writing, dreaming, and humming. The writing journey began with me wanting to be a better jazz teacher and student, to tap in with the multiverse of its people and history more deeply. Then the journey took me out into multiverses of all music. At the end of the journey was an opportunity to better understand the multiverses-within-multiverses of my first love, video game music. So I took it. And resounding through all the writing, the entire journey, was a magical and difficult truth: that the myths, mysteries, fables, urban and rural legends, tribal origin stories, and spiritual beliefs of countless communities worldwide — the powerful stories from which all “fantasy fiction” comes — have been deeply missing in video game storytelling, and thus its music.

That’s your Subatlantic folk tale heard in the running tap of your nearest river or well.

That’s your hood hero, and her queer femme journey backwards through time to the childhood of the first woman to open a grocery store there.

That’s a divine and urgent map into your next adventure that winked at you while you stared into the black opal of your people’s nearest mountain.

Deeply missing are the tow of these stories; the accents and inflections of the voices telling these stories; the stories themselves. And through every breath of the writing, I felt at least a million multiverses of how this magical and difficult truth is true for my people, black people, everywhere, across all identities. And then I felt it, at least a million times a million multiverses, for all people, everywhere, across all identities. 1400 pages later, it was time for my 16-year old egg to hatch.

In the sage spirit of Wayne Shorter, who said “play what you wish for,” I offer you this: a music project I’ve wished for my whole life. Though many words were involved in creating OE, I offer you music with no words in it. I offer you something I’m calling “game music plus,” and I invite my fellow musicians to make this kind of music with me! As this project will offer me a praxis I can breathe through — long as I’m breathing — I offer you this multiplayer adventure in sound, with all its main missions and many many many side quests. I offer these things to you, dear listener, from the fabric of my musicianship, to celebrate magic, fantasy, fantastical worlds, living beings, and life itself — in all the video game ways I know, quirky and enchanted, tiny and powerful. I offer you music you can hum, all from the feeling that, for all your journeys, you are soon coming up on a place to replenish, that a save point is near. I offer you Oasis Effect. And this is the Oasis Effect Demo Disc, Volume 1.

This is a start screen. Press “play” to begin.