Take me to new worlds

What is world building, and how can we use it as musicians to make more powerful music?

Warning: I spent too long on this essay because I found this topic incredibly interesting. Hopefully you do too? I apologize that it’s a bit longer than usual, and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments!

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One of the joys of being a dad is the ability to drive your kids crazy.

There’s this line from KPop Demon Hunters — “Heels, nails, blade, mascara / fit check for my napalm era” — and nothing is guaranteed to generate a deeper, more toe-curdling cringe from my kids than when I say that line. My 6 year old lets out a howl of faux rage. My 3 year old rolls her eyes, as if she already knows there’s no hope for me. It’s a complete victory. Full dad lameness achieved.

But here’s the thing: It’s stuck in my head in part because it’s a great line. It happens early in the film, in the very first song, and helps introduce us to the world we’re being ushered into, a world where fashion-conscious, culturally-relevant KPop idols are also blade-wielding demon destroyers. It’s a great juxtaposition: girls casually adjusting their makeup while rapping about melting demons with horrific jelly-laden fire bombs.

It’s a great example of world building — the art of crafting an internally coherent set of rules, environments, and systems for a creative work, be it art, fiction, video game, comic, music, or something else.

World building is a skill you normally hear about in relation to fantasy and sci fi — but I feel like there’s a lot for musicians to learn here as well. We all spend a lot of time plonking out notes in hopes of catching a nice melody, but I’m curious about what creative possibilities open up if we reframe our mission a bit? If we’re not crafting “songs,” but rather vessels to transport people to imagined places full of beautiful detail and life?

Because I realized the other day that lots of the music I find most moving does this, whether consciously or not. It immerses you in something new and different. It hints at the existence of something deeper and carries you off toward the infinite, toward imagined realities and dream lands. It unearths hidden things and unknown things and impossible things — and the possibility that those things are actually all around you every day in your waking life.

I once asked the composer Ryan Lott of Son Lux what he tries to accomplish with his music, and he replied “transcendence.” World builders help audiences transcend.

So what is world building and how can we use it?

A compelling world is fertile ground for good stories.

I found this definition on the website of the World Building Institute, a non-profit run out of USC:

“World Building designates a narrative practice in which the design of a world precedes the telling of a story; the richly detailed world becomes a container for narrative, producing stories that emerge logically and organically from its well-designed core.” — World Building Institute, USC

Maybe a little verbose, but I like that definition because it hints at why world building can be so valuable:

• First, you design a series of parameters that are full of imaginative possibilities.

• Then, you can tell lots of stories using them.

If you’ve designed an interesting world, then the stories you tell within it can be endless. C.S. Lewis takes us through the wardrobe again and again. Faulkner always returns to Yoknapatawpha County in every novel. George R.R. Martin told so many stories about Westeros that I think he lost himself inside it. He’s still there somewhere trying to untangle himself from the 760 different character threads he spun up.

Musicians can play this game as well. The Icelandic band Sigur Rós often sing in a fictional language sometimes referred to as “hopelandic,” which creates an instantly recognizable ethereal environment within which many of their songs take root. The jazz artist and self-proclaimed alien abductee Sun Ra shrouded his past in mystery, renamed all his instruments, dressed his band up in elaborate costumes, and preached a mythology that connected Ancient Egypt with outer space. The synthwave artist Com Truise has multiple albums and EPs that score the story of an android astronaut on a space mission to make contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. The android falls in love and has to escape a looming extraterrestrial war. It’s compelling stuff, all set to warbled retrofuturistic synth tones.

In each of these cases, the artists invented a specific world, whether narrative or sonic, that was interesting and expansive enough to inspire a lot of different creative output.

We’ve all read that constraints can boost creativity. That’s essentially what world building is, except that the constraints are complex, detailed, and interesting enough to dip into again and again.

World building allows us to breathe life into old ideas.

If there was a Mount Rushmore of world builders, the biggest head on it would be J.R.R. Tolkien. He’s the granddaddy of the craft, the huge lazy willow tree against which we all lay our heads.

For him, world building was the point, and he invented many of the languages, myths, and history of Middle Earth long before he wrote about Frodo carrying a ring to Mordor. In fact, he said in one of his letters that the stories were simply a vessel for the Elvish languages he had invented, Quenya and Sindarin and their various dialects and etymologies. There are in fact multiple books and academic journals dedicated simply to the study of his invented languages and the myths that accompany them.

Tolkien did this in part because he loved this sort of thing, especially words and languages. One of his first jobs was working for the Oxford English Dictionary looking up the Germanic origins of words like “walrus.”

But he also did this because he believed very strongly in the power of what he called “secondary worlds” to help audiences lose themselves in a work of art. A compelling secondary world has the right blend of reality and unreality that there’s both familiarity and lots to discover. Here he is in an article he wrote called On Fairy Stories:

“It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

Many have argued that there are only a couple basic building blocks from which every story is derived. Tolkien doesn’t care, as long as the world those stories inhabit is interesting and exciting.

This is highly relatable for musicians. After all, most popular music uses the same building blocks. If you’re staying in a single key, which most popular music does, then you really only have six chords and seven distinct pitches to choose from (no one really uses the viiº diminished chord). That’s not a ton to work with.

To make something interesting, you need to sweat the details. Timbre, instrumentation, voice leading, filters, effects, tempos, syncopation, arrangement — the way all those parameters combine is the work of making something exciting and new. That’s the world building part of the process.

Both Johnny Cash and Trent Reznor recorded versions of Reznor’s song “Hurt,” but one evokes the end of life while the other evokes a harsh beginning to it. That’s because of the musical choices they each made, Johnny’s close-miked guitar, over-compressed vocals, and the melancholy pedal tone of the chorus versus Trent’s harsh atmospherics, bratty vocals, and defiant dissonance.

World building is about not just paying attention to the details, but submerging yourself in them, adorning yourself with them like a cape and a crown, and finding joy and depth and delight in the imaginative possibilities of it all.

A compelling world is both familiar and strange.

When Walt Disney was working on Bambi, the famed fawn whose mom gets shot and who struggles to walk on ice, he was obsessed with the animation. He wanted every detail to be as realistic as possible, and had animals coming through the studio on the daily for the animators to study. They obsessed over nature films, spent hours at the zoo, and even studied anatomical drawings of the insides of deer (ew). They made over a million drawings and 250,000 animation cels.

And yet, the animals can talk. And have expressions like human children. And are filmed cantering around in colorful and expressionistic visualizations of nature.

A great world is like that: Both familiar and distinct. You can recognize elements of it and feel at home in its contours, and yet be incredibly excited to discover what else it has to offer. And like the eventual film Bambi, which was whittled down from many, many hours of filmed content, the songs or works you create with it may only show a small part of all that the world has to offer.

Maybe the best world building band of all-time is Gorillaz. The very first song on their first album is called “Re-Hash,” and it kicks off with a classic boom bap beat. It’s like creator Damon Albarn wanted to make sure you knew what was happening here right off the bat. This is a hip-hop/pop band manufactured for stardom. It’s meant to be familiar musically.

Except of course they’re not real. They’re a bunch of animated characters with sordid back stories, a range of weird skill sets and interests, and a variety of strange apocalyptic scenarios they keep encountering.

And it’s the fictional elements that drive so much of the music. Albarn uses his characters to explore musical ideas that he couldn’t if he was limited by a real band. Murdoc is a bassist who is also a Satanist, was abused as a child, and is loosely modeled on Keith Richards. As such, he drives lots of the grimier, more punk elements of the sound. The lead singer 2-D was developed as a play on a “classic stupid pretty boy singer.” His spacey persona serves up the slightly dreamy vocals.

In each of these characters, Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett are playing with real life stereotypes while translating them to fantastic characters and scenarios. And like so many of the examples we’ve seen, it’s interesting enough to support eight (soon to be nine) albums, tours, and countless music videos.

There are narrative worlds and aesthetic ones.

Back to KPop Demon Hunters. The film has two different veins of world building. Firstly, it presents a world where Korean folklore comes to life, where humans are protected from demons by the power of a music-fueled barrier called the honmoon, and where messages are delivered by a lethargic blue cat named Derpy Tiger. We could call that the narrative, the particular lore from which the story derives.

At the same time, there’s a series of stylistic rules it adheres to, the aesthetic world it inhabits: The songs always sync with the action, the animation is highly exaggerated for effect, and verses are often battlegrounds for people’s souls. It’s partly an extended music video, with great hooks, fast-paced arrangements, anime references, and the required rap verses.

I think that’s a useful distinction. Narrative world building involves the setting, the story, and the mythology you’re building. Aesthetic world building involves the stylistic rules you’re setting for yourself.

You can see both approaches in music. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is a narrative world. He’s a bisexual alien rock star sent to offer hope to humans before falling to his own ego. The songs themselves weren’t even necessarily written for this specific story, the story was crafted later to bring them all together. Coheed and Cambria is another great example — every album is a concept album for an ongoing interstellar storyline called The Amory Wars.

A band like Boards of Canada, on the other hand, creates worlds that are more aesthetically formulated. They aren’t really messing around with specific narratives, but their sonic world is highly distinctive anyway, defined by specific approaches, lots of analog gear, tape hiss, and warbly sounds meant to induce nostalgia. Bon Iver, Burial, Sigur Rós — projects with a strong sonic signature all fit this approach.

That’s not to say these two things don’t overlap. If you’re creating a narrative world, that will affect your aesthetic choices and vice versa. Writing music for a project meant to take place in the ‘80s will probably include synths and drum machines, etc. But you may feel inspired by different approaches at different times, and separating the two may help with that.

What makes this world distinctive?

My band Sontag Shogun has been most successful at world building in our live shows, and it’s been mostly aesthetic. We created a series of rules for ourselves in order to create something immersive for the audience — things like no pre-recorded backing tracks, and every sound needs to be physically produced live. The world Sontag Shogun is creating live is one where laptop computers don’t exist, and convenience takes a back seat to attempted alchemy.

Are there easier ways to make music? Yes. But people consistently tell us that they love trying to figure out where each sound is coming from. It’s our world, and it’s different.

That said, I also know many artists who take more of a narrative approach. Kimbra talks about embodying specific characters in her songs, something that’s also been done by Janelle Monae, MF Doom, and Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce. I’ve already mentioned Com Truise who is scoring a specific story in his mind.

Regardless of the approach, it feels like a useful question to start with might be something along the lines of:

What makes the world I’m creating distinctive from reality or from other worlds I know?

Maybe you’re someone who will get carried away by the imaginative possibilities of inventing different narrative details and settings. If so, you can ask yourself:

• Is there a mythology I’m tapping into here?

• Are there specific characters I’m embodying and what are they bringing to it?

• Where and when does this song or album take place in time and space?

• What’s the atmosphere and setting like?

• What magic happens in this world beyond what we see in ours?

Or maybe you’re someone who’s a bit more process oriented, and you can ask yourself:

• What instruments and timbres will I limit myself to for this piece?

• What constraints should I set for myself on this project?

• What are the aesthetic rules for this piece that are different from others I’ve done?

• What media am I using to communicate my story?

Side note: After beginning this essay, I stumbled upon this essay by Sound of Fractures on world building as a release strategy, which is another cool way you can build a narrative or aesthetic world through your art: the use of multimedia to help convey your story.

Some worlds you might find within what you create.

The questions above assume you might find it creatively productive to start sketching out a world and then creating works within that world, but what if you take a different approach? What if you just happen to write something and then notice that you created a world accidentally in the process?

I suspect this may actually be more common. You write something that you like. Then, you try to bottle the parts of it that you like and use them again in the next song. In the process, you’re slowly, gradually developing a unique constellations of techniques and tastes all your own — the ultimate distinctive world.

In many ways, isn’t that what finding your own unique sound is? Just a slightly longer and more trial-and-error-driven approach to world building, the world according to you, a truly unique gathering of cells, circumstances, and experiences that will never happen again.

The Templin Institute has a video series on world building I found useful, and in it, they differentiate between “architects” and “gardeners.” Architects are those who develop the universe and the setting before the story, while gardeners are those who develop the story first and then build out the universe from there. The point is: Either works. Whatever you find more creatively productive.

Music is about stories

I had a conversation with my dad recently where he asked about whether AI will replace musicians. Obviously, he’s not alone in this worry, and I’m sure there will be instances where this happens — some ad music, YouTube music, certain algo-derived playlists, etc.

But ultimately, I’m an optimist because I think music is about telling stories, stories that help us connect with each other as humans. It’s the stories within the music — the tension and release, the build moments and restrained moments, even the drama that goes into making it — that move us to tears or remind us we’re not alone or have us screaming on the dance floor. And it’s through telling and consuming stories that we’re better able to understand our lives and our neighbors.

World building is just another way to tell stories — but stories big enough to get inside and move around in. And maybe it’s through creating and traveling to new worlds that we’re better able to understand our own.

Which seems like a good use of art to me.

Take me to new worlds,
Ian

—
Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

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Five Interesting Things

1. The wonderful Stephan Kunze included the Sontag Shogun album Päiväkahvit on his list of top 25 ambient albums of 2025. Thank you! Also, lots of great stuff to listen to in here. You can also revisit the article my band mate Jesse wrote when we released that record here.

2. I already mentioned him in the essay but I really liked Sound of Fractures essay on world building as a release strategy. He developed a video game to go with his last release, which is so creative — reminds me of Helios back in the day. You can even play it here.

3. We just finished up a short tour. In Montréal, it was -22 C, which is quite cold, but we played with an artist named L Con, and I love her last record. You should too. Stunning instrumentation, tape loops, and ethereal vocals.

4. If you really want to go down a Gorillaz rabbit hole, check out the Gorillaz Wiki. I did not know this was a thing. It’s got every backstory, every plot point, every character you could ever want. Also, watch the music videos.

5. If you want to go WAYYYYYY deeper on world building, check out this video series from the Templin Institute.