We All Become, by Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett.
Played: Off-Peak
Off-Peak is a strange little game that largely functions as an interactive musical showcase and art gallery. You can download it here for free. There’s a strange atmosphere to the whole thing - parts felt like they conjured the paranoia of William S. Burroughs, while others bordered on psychedelia. It’ll take you about half an hour to get through the whole thing, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Dive, by Caribou.
Cry Me A River, by Chvrches.
The Bends, by Doomtree.
Hero, by Family of the Year.
Two nights ago.
I wasn’t expecting Digging In The Carts, a six-part documentary series on Japanese video game music, to be that interesting; encountering the depth and brilliant editing on display, then, was a welcome surprise. It starts with the very first video games out of Japan (complete with a few thoughts about whether or not the theme from Space Invaders counts as music) and spreads out from there, and if you have any interest in video games, or Japan, or sound design, or music, or hip-hop, you should check it out here. The final episode comes out at the end of this week.
9/10/2014
First, some housekeeping.
Both Dystopolis and Tales from the End are now available on Gumroad, Smashwords, and hopefully a bunch of other places soon. If you’re into owning digital files, I really recommend Gumroad - they have a slick interface, and make it incredibly simple to buy and download digital stuff. Reflecting this, they’re now $6.99 and $5.99 respectively, but that’s still pretty cheap. A Fireball and Coke at the Paradise Rock Club is $8, and that didn’t kill me, so I doubt this will either.
(Don’t buy drinks at the Paradise Rock Club. Good God.)
Also, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the audiobook. Turns out that audio fidelity on my current microphone isn’t exactly perfect, so either I’ll figure out a way to tune things up, or delegate it to someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom, or just not do it. (Do you know someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom? Let me know.)
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I have an essay in the latest issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, about Monsters University. You can subscribe or buy the single issue here (if you go for the latter, you’re looking for School), and I absolutely recommend you do - BW/DR still showcases some of the best film writing out there, and I promise I’m not just saying that because I somehow swindled them into including me among their ranks.
Everything below this is about stuff I’ve been consuming, media-wise, so for the sake of brevity I’ll throw in a cut here. But please, do finish this if you feel like it. I think my taste is okay.
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I have been playing and watching and listening to so much stuff, you guys. Tonight I watched Heathers, and while I absolutely now believe the hype (that film has one of the best endings to a high school comedy I’ve ever seen, and had me silently punching the air while wiping away tears, which is a surprisingly complex gestural act), I am utterly unconvinced of Christian Slater’s ability to act. He seems to think that squinting and channelling Nag from The Jungle Book makes him seem interesting and imposing. Really, it makes him look silly. Winona Ryder is incredible, though. She’s also one of those people who I see in films and loudly exclaim “come on, that’s just not fair” at.
I also watched The Great Gatsby. I’m of two minds about it - I think that when the film is consumed by the headiness of the twenties, it really excels - there’s a spellbinding soundtrack, and a very snappy visual style, and Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty much perfect casting as a former sparkling youth who’s desperately trying to hide his age. The problems come when the film slows down and gets serious, which Baz Luhrmann really isn’t very good at - he tries, bless him, but it never quite comes together. Where Luhrmann excels is in finding beauty and melancholy through chaos, but the way that Gatsby is structured is almost as two films - one that shows the chaos upfront, and one that attempts and fails to grasp some distance. But it was fun. And my God, that soundtrack.
I also played A Story About My Uncle for the first time and Dragon Age Origins for the third. The former is a beautiful first-person platformer. Here’s a screenshot:
Right? Look at that nonsense.
Dragon Age: Origins is a 60-hour RPG that I can’t even begin to explain, for fear that I won’t do it justice - at its core is a very simple “assemble an army and beat the bad guys” story, but what with it being sixty hours long there’s quite a lot more than that going on. It’s very good, though. The third in the (presumed) trilogy comes out this November, and I am anxiously awaiting to see if it’ll run on this laptop or not.
Okay. I think I’m just about done. I’ve been listening to a lot of Porter Robinson and the soundtrack to Purgateus. They do not go well together, but apart they’re great.
Luftrauser, by KOZILEK.
Different Pulses, by Asaf Avidan.
Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End), by The Darkness.
Chamakay, by Blood Orange.
The first “Esper Edition” version of the Blade Runner soundtrack was a two-disc bootleg made by someone with access to the original masters of the music Vangelis recorded for the film; it restored over an hour of music absent from the official soundtrack, and can still be found now. This, though, I had missed - a five-disc effort from the same unknown individual, collecting together those two initial discs, music that only appeared on the workprint edition (with Harrison Ford’s awful voiceover), an ambient soundscape incorporating the sounds of the movie (there were thousands recorded in the studio), a bunch of remixes and a few tracks that Vangelis recorded which never made it into the film. It’s incredible. I have no idea how this exists.
I should add that linking to this is a copyright infringement too far for me, but you should definitely hunt this down.
Reflektor, by Arcade Fire.
Barely kept still this week.
Enemy Unknown (Menu Music), by Michael McCann. From the soundtrack to XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Turf, by El Huervo.
Paperman, by Christophe Beck.
Played: Proteus
- I bought Proteus months ago, but today was the first day I cried playing it.
- It’s hard to explain. Proteus is a game with solid colours, a largely-uninhabited island, nothing to do apart from walk around and bask in the procedurally generated music and environmental events. Sometimes, going somewhere will trigger a certain action. It doesn’t need to, though.
- I don’t want to spoil the game by saying what made me cry, which makes something like this very hard to write. Occasionally, though, the game sweeps you off your feet and casts your expectations aside, and that’s what makes this exciting - that despite appearances, you never know what’s next.
- It was released on Steam last week for the (bargain) price of £6.29/$8.99, and it’s definitely worth your time.