Music in Minecraft

“Key,” in Minecraft’s Volume Alpha, is a song straight out of the liminal boundary between waking and sleeping, the real world and the dream world / dreamscape. It evokes floating on your back in water or drifting in blue-purple outer space, out to some distant star. Although other songs evoke nighttime, sleeping and dreaming (“Minecraft,” “Subwoofer Lullaby”), “Key” is important as the first track and for the metaphor of someone unlocking a new world, especially in light of Minecraft’s The End Poem, where Minecraft, and life itself, are implied to be the long dream.

By the end of “Key,” you are transported to your new world. The second track, aptly named “Door,” seamlessly continues the positive liminal theme. In imagining “Door,” I think of when I restored my old world after the Adventure Update. I slept in my old bed, in my old base, before waking up, opening the front door, going out and exploring the world. “Door” evokes that dramatic arc, and then closes with the first day ending, making camp and going to sleep.