‘Trauma is messy, however music will come of it’: Jessica Curry on her new album, Shielding Songs | Video games

For the lucky amongst us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, turn out to be a reminiscence – if not distant, then actually ever-so-slightly pale. We have now had a couple of years now, to get on the market, to rebuild careers and relationships, to journey, to dwell on this planet once more. That’s not the case for everybody. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to video games equivalent to Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture and Expensive Esther, has solely simply emerged. Recognized with a degenerative illness in her mid-20s and significantly immunocompromised because of her situation, she started isolating in the beginning of the pandemic, and for the following 5 years barely left her residence. Whereas there, unable to work or write, her world started to break down.

“Like many individuals I had a very painful and troublesome pandemic,” she says. “I watched my dad die on Zoom, after which my auntie and extra members of the family. Then they discovered a tumour in my ovary, and I had main stomach surgical procedure, however the operation had gone incorrect, so I almost died in 2022. Whereas I used to be recovering from the third operation, the roof of our home fell in. It felt like a metaphor for every part. If a novelist had written this, nobody would consider the story. And issues simply stored going incorrect. So I wasn’t writing music, I wasn’t even listening to music. Swiftly, I couldn’t bear it. I’m nonetheless attempting to work out what that rejection was about – I used to be simply in an excessive amount of of a psychological disaster. I wasn’t even feeding or dressing myself.”