Voices Carry

Mason cultivated this kind of boldness at Oberlin. After entering college as a baroque violin major, she quickly found herself struggling to progress beyond a certain level. “I had been working so hard for years to make this happen, to get into the conservatory,” she says. “It was my dream school. But that instrument was simply not suited to my body.”

So during her first year, she came up with a solution: switching to viola da gamba. She spent Winter Term learning the instrument and, six months later, re-auditioned for the conservatory—and was accepted. “It’s because they all believed in me,” Mason says today. “They could see that I had this work ethic and drive and that I had a special connection to this instrument.

“I did have to work extra hard that first couple years, but I couldn’t have done any of that without this very unique support that Oberlin can offer,” she adds, citing things like Winter Term. “And I respect that dedication to their students by letting somebody do something like that. That’s so unique. I don’t think that would happen at another school.”

At Oberlin, Mason was given free rein to explore her “nerdy” interests, like baroque and Renaissance music. But she also learned how to improvise and taught herself how to sing two notes at once—the latter a skill that’s become an in-demand part of her arsenal. “Lots of composers will be like, ‘Can you do your overtone singing here, here, and here?’” she says. “I’m like, ‘I learned this in my bathroom at Oberlin—but sure.’”

By her fourth year, Mason signed a record deal with Germany-based Danse Macabre Records for her solo electronic music. After graduating, she moved to L.A. and continued producing albums of original synth pop. But along the way, her longtime friend Stephanie Economou tapped her to contribute music production and later vocals on a freelance basis to several composition projects. “When she heard my vocals, she was like, ‘I want you to sing on everything now,’” Mason says. “A lot of the voices out here in Hollywood have the same vibe, the same type of quality, and my approach was a bit different because I’m an instrumentalist.”

Over the next few years, the pair cemented their collaboration across multiple projects, including scores for two expansion packs of the popular video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Siege of Paris and Dawn of Ragnarök. Mason sang and played viola da gamba on both soundtracks; the latter was a particularly evocative, timeless score that reflects the video game’s fantasy- based plot by incorporating influences from metal music.

“A lot of the composers I work with are looking for that timeless quality right now—or somebody who knows about music beyond the modern era, even if I don’t always necessarily incorporate it into the scores,” she says. This knowledge especially paid off with Dawn of Ragnarök, where her job “was to be the weird, ancient music person,” she says with a laugh, doing things like singing in Old Norse or mimicking the ancient Nordic animal calls people use to beckon their sheep.

In early 2023, Dawn of Ragnarök ended up becoming the first winner in a brand-new Grammy category, Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. (Economou won the main award, and Mason received a Grammy certificate for being the featured artist.) Major opportunities have continued to roll in, via video games (Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Mortal Kombat I) and TV shows (Vikings: Valhalla). For the 2023 animated film Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken, she even had the chance to invent a Kraken language—a modified take on Old Norse.

From a creative standpoint, releasing Fever Dreams continues to pay dividends “Composers already call me to improvise or do something unique when they’re at a place where they don’t know what to do,” she says. “So I was already out of the box. But this took me so much further than I had been—and gave me the opportunity to stretch myself beyond a certain genre and medium.”

No matter what Mason’s doing, Oberlin is never far from the surface. “I feel like Oberlin lives in everything that I do,” she says. “I was surrounded by other creative young people and the teachers, both in the historical performance department and outside of it, were all so supportive. I carry that support with me.”

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