Temple OST

Temple OST is an album-length CGI music video for Lawrence Lek’s video game set in a deserted, post-crisis London. Originally commissioned for an exhibition at 180 The Strand, the work operates simultaneously as film, game, and soundscape: an immersive journey through a simulated city where spectral ravers travel from a ruined Tube station to a ghostly nightclub buried underground.

A companion to Lek’s feature-length musical AIDOL (2019), in which a fading pop diva stages a comeback with help from an AI ghostwriter, Temple OST extends that narrative into a playable club environment rendered cinematic. Drawing from the Japanese term karaoke – ‘empty orchestra’ – the film unfolds as a nonlinear requiem: a rave without ravers, a dancefloor after the fall.

Constructed entirely from in-game footage and scored to an original album composed by Lek, Temple OST blurs the line between narrative cinema and virtual architecture. Its ethereal anthems and synthetic refrains echo through vacant tunnels and neon corridors, mapping the emotional landscape of a world where memory persists only as simulation.

Developed in the aftermath of personal loss, the film’s empty club becomes more than a setting; it is a spatial expression of absence, escapism, and emotional residue. At once elegy and environment, Temple OST reframes the music video as extended cinematic architecture—a full-length portrait of a future haunted by its own past.

Credit: Commissioned for 180 The Strand. Soundtrack available on the Vinyl Factory (VF344).