Released on September 25, 2001 in North America to generally favorable albeit mixed reviews, Silent Hill 2 has gone on to be regarded not just as one of the best horror games of all time, but one of the best games ever, full stop. A departure from the story of the first installment on the PS1 two years prior, the sequel has seen praise over the past two decades for its unnerving atmosphere, horrifying monster designs and deeply painful ending that has lead to a die-hard fanbase. Its soundtrack in particular, handled by now legendary and hyper-prolific games composer Akira Yamaoka, is no small contributor to the success of the title. Silent Hill 2’s unique OST has never been replicated, running the gamut of jangly alt-rock to oppressive atonal noise. So when its parent company Konami announced a remake back in October 2023 to be handled by developer Bloober Team with help from Yamaoka and original concept artist Masahiro Ito, hands immediately started wringing in concern and excitement as they awaited more information.

Enter Corey Parks, guitarist and vocalist for Indianapolis black thrashers GraveRipper. A dedicated lifelong gamer and ’90s Konami superfan complete with a Metal Gear Solid tattoo, Parks had been interested in crafting his own take on Yamaoka’s celebrated compositions for quite a while. After Konami revealed the long-awaited remake last October, it was enough to get him moving on what would become Restless Dreams, a black metal tribute to survival horror masterpiece. Focusing on five select tracks from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack and a bonus track from the first Silent Hill, and with Parks handling all instrumentation and composition, the self-titled debut EP is set to be unleashed—when else?—October 8, the same day as the remake. With Parks being a true collector unsatisfied with a digital-only album, Restless Dreams will see a physical CD release in a genuine PS2 case—though by the point you read this, those copies are long sold out. “It’s definitely reached a very niche group of people, which is exactly who we made it for,” Parks explains of the project’s enthusiastic supporters. “They’re on the internet—who would’ve thought?”

As we wait in our special place for both Restless Dreams and Silent Hill 2, you can now stream Parks’ blackened take on “Theme of Laura (Reprise)” as well as learn more about what went into the making of this labor of love.

RESTLESS DREAMS by RESTLESS DREAMS

Tell us a little bit about what spurred you to put together the Restless Dream project. Was this directly the result of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, or was this something that you had always wanted to do independently?
Definitely something I’ve always wanted to do independently. I had the idea for it years ago, at least. I had reached out to some people maybe in 2021, maybe even 2022, other Silent Hill fans that were in the metal scene to see if they wanted to try to do it. It didn’t work out. I always wanted to do it, it was always in the back of my head, and then I started taking notes on parts that I [thought] would translate over from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack to being more of a metal texture. Once Konami rebooted the whole series and said, “We’re going to kick things off with the SH2 remake,” I’m like, Well, I’ve got to do it now. It’s the perfect time.

You didn’t cover the entire OST. You instead focused on five songs with the bonus track “Not Tomorrow” being an acoustic cover from Silent Hill 1 soundtrack. What went into choosing the songs that you picked?
Basically just the ones that I thought sounded the heaviest and could translate over the best. I’d really take my time and listen to the soundtrack, and if I couldn’t feel that it would be a good translation or it didn’t inspire me to do it, I didn’t do it.

I really love “Not Tomorrow” from Silent Hill 1. It spoke to me also, but I couldn’t think of a metal way to do it. I’m sure there is a way to do it, but I couldn’t think of it at the time. I’m glad you noticed it—it’s the only one from Silent Hill 1 and it’s the only track on the entire thing that’s fully acoustic. That’s the difference maker, you know what I mean? Be the one that’s in black and white if the whole thing’s in color.

Were there other songs that you started to explore and just didn’t quite feel like they adapted well?
Yeah, absolutely. When I started this whole thing—I try to be a very organized dude—I would set everything up originally in a Google spreadsheet and I would take notes on which soundtrack it was off, which parts I liked in the songs I could translate over. There were tracks on at least SH1 through 4 that I was going to try to use [and] they just didn’t end up working out. And then I just honed it into being just Silent Hill 2.

Did the tracks from 2 lend more metal persuasion to things, or was it that you just had the most excitement about those ones in particular?
Definitely that I had the most excitement about those and they lent themselves to being metal. I think the theme song to Silent Hill 3 is already a pretty rock ‘n’ rolling track—there’s no point in me doing this [song]. It’s just going to be the same vibe and I’m not going to do that. I’m going to try to add some sort of extra flair to it, if I can.

Speaking of that flair, the songs have a very distinct black metal flair to them with atmospheric samples for good measure. What do you feel black metal brings to the compositions?
I think that Silent Hill takes a lot of inspiration from Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks is set in an area that is geographically very similar to the Norwegian kind of black metal look—a lot of evergreens, a lot of mountains, a lot of fog. Those puzzle pieces fit together. I think black metal brings that atmosphere to it. And I think if you listen to the recording, it captures it pretty well. To take a lot of the melodies that [original Silent Hill series composer] Akira Yamaoka wrote and to add that layering of tremolo guitars behind it with a lot of reverb and the blast beats—that dissonant, chaotic sound—I think that’s what it has to bring. I think they work together really well.

He was even incorporating tremolo picking. Not in the same way, but it’s still present, even though it’s more of a mandolin than a distorted guitar.
I think that might have even been what kind of kicked this whole thing off subconsciously: the theme from the first game, which has that very distinct mandolin part. The theme from Silent Hill 2 also has it, but not as heavy as in SH1. That minor scale tremolo mandolin picking part that I know we’re all thinking about—dude, that is black metal. That is, by definition, a black metal melody. I think subconsciously that might have even been what kicked it off.

“That minor scale tremolo mandolin picking part that I know we’re all thinking about—dude, that is black metal.”

“Theme of Laura (Reprise)” is a very somber piece originally performed on piano and violin. What was your approach for adapting this song?
This track was very easy to adapt. In fact, this was the first track I experimented with. I would have the music playing in my earbuds and sit down on the drum kit to see if my ideas would work. The light cymbal touches, blast beats and double bass sections came very naturally. The feeling of despair, longing and mournfulness were already there in the composition, so it was an easy translation from Yamaoka’s classical string composition to the melancholic atmosphere of black metal. It was a no brainer to cover. The music translated naturally and as players of the game know, this is one of the most intense, memorable parts of not only SH2, but the franchise as a whole.

You said that you explored songs from other soundtracks. Do you hope to go back and re-examine them and give them another shot, or is your heart still going to be with Silent Hill 2?
I don’t know. I would definitely love to maybe explore other games that Yamaoka has done because he has a very big discography of work he’s done. But I almost think sometimes that Restless Dreams could expand to being more than just Silent Hill because there are a lot of really great soundtracks out there with really, really painful pieces of music behind them. I’m almost more inspired to investigate what some of these other tracks that I’ve always loved that are clearly metal tracks at their core, how I could translate those over.

What recommendations could you make for other game soundtracks for somebody who would be a fan of Restless Dreams or Akira Yamaoka?
Going to [Silent Hill 2 Remake developer] Bloober [Team], I’m pretty sure he did The Medium and things like that. I can’t think of games specifically—maybe their whole soundtrack isn’t great. That’s a really great question. I’ve always been a fan of some of the creepier music in the [Legend of] Zelda games. I think those have a really great, classical, haunting vibe to them. Basically anything that comes out of Japan, especially that golden era of Konami horror and just horror in the ’90s.

That’s an interesting shout. Zelda definitely does have some creepier, more atmospheric track. I’m [James] thinking of A Link to the Past. One of the particular dungeon themes is very much a higher register. Not like a violin literally, but kind of sharp, like what kind of things I feel like would line up well with with Silent Hill soundtracks.
Yeah. I always try to explain this one song in particular to a friend. He’s like, “Well, it’s just the tuning,” and I’m like, “No, it’s more than the tuning, man. You’re crazy.” I think it’s the [Skull Woods] theme in A Link to the Past in the Dark World. It’s this bow, bow, bow sound that’s happening in the background. I was always like, Dude, that sounds like Ordo Ad Chao Mayhem. I don’t know why, it just has this really, really deep, nasty sound to it. I’m like, Dude, this is this is evil. This is mean.

Without giving it away too much, one of the tracks I was really thinking about doing going forward—maybe just as a single—would be [a] Legend of Zelda one. I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s the last segment of Majora’s Mask when the moon’s falling and it just has this incredibly moving, so heavy, haunting cello theme going on. It’s just so heavy. Everyone in the town has left to do their own thing or they boarded up the rooms. It’s got, like, “the old people from Titanic who have just accepted that this is the end, this is death, there’s no way to escape this” [vibe]. The music behind it is just so heavy. I would really like to try to do that track.

There’s a physical release modeled after a PS2 case that sold out very quickly. A lot of care went into the different parts of that. To you, what is important about the physical release for this?
What’s so funny is, like, how it looks, man—none of this was my idea. I think that might be the best part. I worked with Wise Blood Records and Wise Blood is such a great collaborator. [Label owner] Sean [Fraiser] is such a stand up, phenomenal guy and he’s just a collaborator with me at this point with everything I’ve done with GraveRipper. To spill the beans here, I called Sean up to have him help me with the campaign for this, to see if he could help me get some press or what he would recommend. And I went into this phone call like, “I don’t want to work with you on this. This is nothing against you, I just don’t want to be crunched with Wise Blood Records. I want to reach out and do my own thing, maybe get with somebody else,” et cetera, et cetera. And he immediately fires back with, “Well, what if we did a physical run in PS2 cases?” And I’m like, “Dude, I’m sold.” [Laughs] That’s all it took.

The image that I chose for the front is the hotel on the lake. That’s the climax of the game and where the special place is and everything, so that was the cover art. We’ve been working with David Jagger to be our graphic designer at Wise Blood for the longest time. I’ve always been a total fanboy of Davey’s graphic design, his layout and his approach to things. So when I showed him the SH2 box art and showed him the logo and was like, “Try to make it look like this,” and he gave me this back, I was like, “Dude, this is the best thing you’ve ever done. You nailed it.” To have the white lettering moving around the restless dreams and stuff—it’s verbatim to the PS2 case.

It’s just so cool to have this being a video game nerd and a metal nerd. The coolest part about the physical [release] and what it means to me is just the excellent collaboration that I had with Sean and Davey and Nico [Albanese] on engineering this record and getting it done. Doing cool stuff with my friends is what it means to me.

The Restless Dreams handmade CD package (original Silent Hill 2 releases not included).

Was it difficult to find somebody who was able to manufacture it in the PlayStation 2 case?
It wasn’t, because Sean and I put these together by hand. [Laughs] It’s a standard DVD-sized case, so we had the insert just printed like a regular DVD cover and those got mailed to us. And then Sean got on eBay or something and found one of those wholesalers who is selling, like, 50 PS2 cases and just bought those and then he came over one day. We did the photo shoots—that’s on Instagram—and we just put all these together at my table, just talking shit and put them together and that was it. So no, it was not hard to put them together at all. And actually, the manufacturer loved the design of the sleeve so much that they even requested, “Can we keep a couple of these?” And we’re like, “Yeah, sure. Go for it.”

Do you hope to do similar physical releases in the future or possibly repress this one?
We will be doing another round of CDs. We will not be doing the PS2 [case] at all, but we do have something really special planned for the second round of physicals also. They are going to get a cool physical release. I don’t know when Sean is planning on announcing it. More CDs will definitely be on the way, so if you want a physical copy, there will be some more.

This is due to come out the same day as the Silent Hill 2 remake. Most importantly: do you have high hopes for the remake?
I do now. At first, I think we were all biting our nails a little bit. I hate to be this guy, but Layers of Fear sucks. If people call my boy Kojima’s Death Stranding a walking simulator, you have not played some of the other Bloober games. Those are real “just hold up, close your eyes and you can beat the game.” At least Death Stranding is the Gran Turismo of walking simulators. Shout out Tim Rogers there. [Laughs]

At first I was nervous. I remember seeing trailers for The Medium and seeing how it looked when the character picked the map up and how the map looked, I was like, Well, that looks just like Silent Hill, and they’re doing the static cameras. I’m like, These guys have to do a Silent Hill remake if it happens. You get into Bloober’s games a little bit, they’re okay, but their atmosphere was always great in those games. They always nailed the atmosphere. So when Konami announces, “Hey, here comes SH2, Bloober is going to do it,” I had no doubt that they were going to get the vibe right. But was the game going to be good? That was the scary part. And then of course we started seeing some gameplay stuff. Restless Dreams was already done and we were just waiting on Konami to announce the release date and then we were going to start ramping up the press with this. And then the trailers started coming out and they didn’t look good. The internet was not having fun with it. And I’m like, Oh god. [Laughs] Regardless, I’m going to release this no matter what the quality is.

But then it looks like they really paid attention to what people were saying, which is how game developers should be nowadays. You have a direct feed with your audience on social media platforms. Once we started to get these last few trailers and then they dropped one or two half-hour gameplay videos—just uncut, unedited, “here’s what the game looks like right now” and then people from Digital Foundry and stuff have played it, et cetera—I think it looks great now. It looks like it’s going to play well the way they’ve redesigned all the areas, but it’s still going to be the same overworld, underworld kind of thing. It looks phenomenal.

I think it’s going to be great. And I hope it means that Konami is really taking some of their most beloved franchises seriously again and we start getting some great titles, because man, Konami’s golden era in the ’90s is untouched. You can compare them to Capcom a lot, and Capcom has been so consistent, but they’ve never hit the peaks that Konami hit when Konami was pushing out SH1, 2, and 3, MGS1, 2, and 3, Castlevania. Now Capcom’s never hit the lows that Konami’s hit either. [Laughs] But yeah, man, I’m very hyped for the Silent Hill 2 remake. I’ll probably play it once by myself—I selfishly like to play games by myself with nobody else around—and then once I get through it once, I’ll probably end up streaming it and go in for completion and stuff.

Restless Dreams is available October 8 via Wise Blood Records and can be pre-ordered here.
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The post KILL SCREEN SIDE QUEST: Stream a New Track From RESTLESS DREAMS, a Silent Hill 2 Black Metal Tribute by GRAVERIPPER’s Corey Parks appeared first on Decibel Magazine.