Shitao is a producer from Paris who has been releasing music since the mid-2000s. In that time, he’s worked on a wide variety of projects, ranging from boom bap to orchestral movie scores. Most recently, we’ve gotten some real (The Waves) and imagined (Child’s Head with Flowers) soundtracks, which have been really interesting projects to dive into. Now Shitao is back with a new project that is video game-inspired, Don’t…Let him go back to the Tower.

This particular project is inspired by the Panzer Dragoon series of video games that were developed for Sega, starting in the mid-‘90s. Shitao has decided to pick up where the series left off, imagining a young woman crossing some places haunted by the memories of past battles years after the events of Panzer Dragoon. To tell this story, he is sampling the works of three composers, Timmy Holiday, Inuyasha, and Jeia. If you are familiar with any or all of these previous works, it probably won’t take much convincing to get you to listen to and engage with this project. If you are unfamiliar with any of these previous works, don’t be scared off. This isn’t so meta that only hardcore fans can engage with it. When you strip away any back story and just listen to the music at face value, what you have is a really beautiful and minimalist instrumental project. It’s mostly built around strings and synths, and the percussion is especially minimal across the project. What this means in practice is that you have a really beautiful and meditative ambient composition, one that you can try to imagine as a soundtrack to a story about a young woman coming to terms with the past violence of an area, or you can just let your imagination run wild. Any way you slice it, it is a really beautiful project that requires a little bit of patience, but for those looking for something a little different, this is a very rewarding listen.

Don’t…Let him go back to the Tower is yet another really creative and different project from Shitao. He not only finds interesting angles to start his projects, he also takes the time and care to make his compositions really beautiful and moving. This is a project that works on multiple levels, but at its core it works because you can hear the passion from Shitao coming through each note.