"Could this be the iPad's Dark Side of the Moon?" - Douglas Wolk

Jim Guthrie helped define Toronto’s musical underground in the last decade, as a solo artist, as a member of Royal City, and as co-founder of Three Gut Records (Constantines, Cuff the Duke), an acknowledged influence on the rise of Broken Social Scene, Feist, Owen Pallett and other international success stories from Toronto.

Today, he’s poised to be part of another entirely different movement. With Guthrie’s new album Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies, he joins Toronto’s new wave of innovation by writing the score for a new videogame called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a multimedia project that combines a lush 8-bit inspired aesthetic, Twitter, narrative elements that echo The Legend of Zelda and Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, the lunar calendar and other surprising elements. Wired UK included it in a list of the “Top 10 videogame releases to watch in 2011” alongside larger scale efforts like Nintendo's 3DS, Rockstar's L.A. Noire & Sony's Uncharted 3.

Guthrie and videogames go way back. A self-taught musician and home recorder, Guthrie began performing live with a Sony Playstation in 2002, playing music he composed with the MTV Music Generator software while on tour across North America and Europe in Royal City. By 2003’s Now More Than Ever, Guthrie had embraced a more organic approach, which got him mainstream attention, licensing deals, a Juno nomination, and respect from a then- new band from Montreal called Arcade Fire, who borrowed his string section to record their album Funeral. Afterward, Guthrie joined Islands’ Nick Thorburn to form the duo Human Highway, whose debut Moody Motorcycle came out in 2008.

Sword & Sworcery represents his greatest challenge yet, and not just for its combination of classic film scores that echo John Carpenter and Ennio Morricone with gaming music both vintage and modern, all the while retaining his distinct personal approach. Guthrie wrote a fully realized score that could not only be deconstructed into loops for various levels of game play, but could also allow room for player interaction.

Guthrie’s relationship with Superbrothers Inc. founder and illustrator Craig D. Adams, the sole artist and animator on the videogame project, goes back to 2004, when Adams, a fan, struck up a correspondence and Adams used some of Guthrie’s Playstation material to score some animated shorts. The two worked closely together on the game's development, a collaboration with the more seasoned videogame designers & programmers at Capy, a Toronto videogame studio making its name in recent years with critically acclaimed efforts like the Playstation Network game Critter Crunch, and the upcoming Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes for Playstation 3 & Xbox 360. Capy effectively made the project happen from start to finish, with Capy creative director Kris Piotrowski on-board as a designer to guide the project to completion.

He hopes to release his long-delayed “normal” album by year’s end, featuring tracks started back in 2005, in a recording session at Arcade Fire’s church studio. Sword & Sworcery is no stopgap release, however; it fits in perfectly with his discography, expands his craft and finds him once again at the centre of a creative movement in Canada’s largest city. - Michael Barclay