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Mike· a year ago

RIP Stone and Wilson

It's not often you lose two absolute titans in the space of a couple days, let alone a couple guys that a good chunk of the population may have already thought were dead. So of course it could fix the dry blog spell. These were two troubled geniuses in an industry where "genius" is thrown around too much and "trouble" is manufactured way too easily.

I came to both Sly Stone and Brian Wilson late. Obviously both were all over oldies radio and I knew their hits by heart, but I didn't see why The Family Stone was important until later, and I didn't "get" the Beach Boys' most artistically successful period until the songs were dragged out of that oldies radio and experienced in the context of the whole Pet Sounds album. When you get into stuff like the Elephant 6 groups, or Jens Lekman, or any number of "baroque pop" acts, you start to realize that he's the wellspring.

As for Sly… on a visceral, purely emotional level I never felt him the way I felt James Brown, but many years ago I bought a used record of There's a Riot Goin' On and I guess I was ready for it. There are weird drum machines, odd textures, entire songs filtered so there's barely any high end — it's experimental in a way that even the Beatles or Stevie Wonder didn't do. And it's funky as hell, played by a mixed-race, mixed-gender group.

It's sad that both of these guys, even though they were highly appreciated in their time, went through at least 6 or 7 levels of Dante's Hell (which circle is "Shortenin' Bread"?), but they seemed to settle into some comfortable elder-statesman status later in life.

Mike· 2 years ago

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Games lately, new year 2025 edition

Here's what I've been mashing my thumbs to for the past few months.

Astro Bot

It's fun. Lots of great little details and a wealth of new mechanics that come and go only once. I can't help but think all the editors of PlayStation-centric sites that called this "game of the year" do not own Nintendos and have never played Mario Odyssey. Still, it's nice to see something like this on PS5. They can't all be grit and despair.

Silent Hill 2 Remake

Speaking of. So much has been said about this game. Pick a dozen other famous titles of and the writing on them combined wouldn't equal the ink given to Silent Hill 2. I read a whole damn book about it. So there's not much that I can add. It's just a great synthesis of storytelling and gameplay throughout, and it's an achievement for so many reasons. It's stressful, it's depressing, the protagonist is not at all likable, combat is terrible — and all of these are intentional. David Lynch, Francis Bacon, or Crime and Punishment are not the ingredients of a typical game, but that's why it's stood up for so long.

Layers of Fear

This is a short walking simulator in the vein of Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch, and it's a sad mystery like those, but it's creepy and loaded with jump scares. Was it Bloober Team's audition to be the Silent Hill 2 remake studio? I don't know, but there is a huge amount of influence from SH, just as Bloober went on to add their own stamp to the remake. Worth a few bucks and a few hours for sure.

Control

Man this game was a blast. It oozes style. The "mid-century modern but just a little off" aesthetic of the sets reminded me of the Legion TV show, and the story is surreal, scary, and funny. It's getting on in age but I am still hesitant to talk about my favorite moments for fear of spoiling anyone who hasn't played it. Control's creators describe it as "weird fiction" but in video game form, and I think that's apt. There are shades of Lovecraft, Cronenberg, Lynch, China Mieville, Jason Pargin, and the SCP Project — but none of those have cool psychic combat.

Alan Wake

I got the much-loved sequel super cheap and it's related to Control, so it seemed like a thing I needed to do. But it didn't do much for me. Unfortunately, as a protagonist Alan Wake isn't much more likable than James Sunderland, but at least in Silent Hill punishing James was the point.

Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate

We consume a lot of Ninja Turtle stuff around here. My daughter is obsessed. We've seen the full run of the 2012 series, Rise of the TMNT, plus Mutant Mayhem numerous times and a good chunk of the original series. Of course, she must never know that there was a live action movie in the early 90s.

Splintered Fate is basically Hades but with TMNT instead of Greek gods. If you understand that and it sounds good to you, play it.

Mike· 2 years ago

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One day, the sadness will end

So said David Lynch, via the Log Lady. Not today, though.

I can't remember the last time such a wide swathe of people and social media accounts were pouring their hearts out about how they feel on someone's passing. It's a testament to how he touched everyone he met and worked with, and how he inspired the artists he never did. Even NASA posted a tribute.

The work, as you probably can imagine if you know me, is hugely important. Eraserhead is a bible for a certain aesthetic that I'll never really grow out of. Pabst Blue Ribbon, no matter how many times I hold a can, will always make me hear Dennis Hopper in my head. And of course, coffee and pie are magical talismans of goodness and purity in a dark, corrupted world.

The thing that probably stands out most to me about the man himself was that he just didn't compromise. Well, he did once, and that was Dune. He would just as soon that hadn't happened, though it holds a special place in a lot of our movie collections. He wouldn't shorten scenes, he wouldn't remove parts, he wouldn't use product placement. As a result, he perhaps made fewer movies before retiring than he might've wanted to — but they were all his movies. I think most artists, especially in this era where even the hobbyists and weekenders are pressured into feeling like they need to turn their work into "content," should pay attention to that.

And whether you believe this or not, it's worth taking it into account as we grieve:

You have to keep Angelo [Badalamenti, of course] alive. I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we'll all meet again, like the song says. It's sad but it's not devastating if you think like that. Otherwise I don't see how anybody could ever, once they see someone die, that they'd just disappear forever and that's what we're all bound to do. I'm sorry but it just doesn't make any sense, it's a continuum, and we're all going to be fine at the end of the story.

Mike· 2 years ago

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The Sounds of Jarre

Here's an interesting thing from a few years ago. Comedian and musician Matt Berry interviews Jean-Michel Jarre about the process of creating his 1976 opus Oxygène.

Despite the space-command-center appearance of this hokey promo clip, the central element was actually an organ called an Eminent 310 Unique. He downplays the machine but clearly it was something a bit special, because the string sound was extracted into the ARP Solina a couple years later. Did the success of Oxygène have anything to do with that? Who knows, but maybe. Add the non-programmable Korg Mini Pops drum machine, and you're 90% of the way through creating this iconic record.

The magic happens, though, when he runs the organ through a Revox echo and an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phaser pedal with a slightly dying battery. Like all EHX pedals, it's not the same these days but they do still make the Small Stone and it's still a great pedal ("Just forget it" says Jarre).

Jarre insists that nobody was running keyboards through guitar pedals at the time. I think that's probably true in his mind, because he's a capital-M Musician. He can play keyboard, and his strong melodies and mini-symphonies are what made such a weird record a mainstream success. But across the channel in the same era, British musicians in the Industrial genre were also running cheap keyboards through guitar pedals to create something far less palatable for the mainstream. Though both used a wide variety of equipment, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire would definitely beg to differ that Jarre was the ultimate in synth innovation.

Still, it's a pretty amazing moment when Jarre builds up from the dry keyboard, to the onboard chorus effect, to the Small Stone pedal, to the echo, and suddenly the sound of "Oxygène Part 1" just manifests out of the air. Even on a podcast, Matt Berry's "holy shit" grin is audible.

Mike· 2 years ago

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The DAK catalog

I had forgotten about the DAK catalog, but I used to love it. If you had met me only in the past couple years, you'd think I was some kind of tech-hater, knowledgeable but only using it when necessary. But I think it's people like me who were so enamored with gadgets and the possibilities of tech who hate it even more these days. Everything seemed so wild and possible.

(Apologies for the GPT-driven copy at the link. Just enjoy the pictures.)

Mike· 2 years ago

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Ah, Websites

Remember websites?

Some friends and some people I don't know got together after the brief run of cohost to start a group blog about... stuff? Things? Not sure. But they started with "Websites I have known and loved,", and though many are younger than I am they're old enough to remember the days before the social media takeover of the internet. I think it's a pretty serious bummer that we're so into our own idea of audience that we prefer these walled gardens of garbage and speedy dopamine that we've all but abandoned websites except when we want to look at a restaurant menu (and that's been co-opted by Bezos's GrubHub more than half the time).

Yes, there are exceptions to this: artists who work in the medium. Think of Dril or the second era of webcomics that blossomed before Instagram's algorithms crushed their ability to actually be read. But though it's cheaper and easier than ever to stand up a website, there may never be another zombo.com (miraculously, it has kept up with technology and still works). There will probably never be another rotten.com either, and while you might think that's great, the more "social" online spaces where that kind of stuff is shared are the worst breeding grounds of right-wing, incel, white supremacist, misogynist trash online. Which means I do have to say, I don't think it's all rose-colored. Something Awful was a great place in some ways, but contributed to the caustic way we interact online (and of course Lowtax turned out to be pretty terrible even if he did have ideas about content moderation that we could probably use more of these days).

Though I like to turn to Molly White's speech that I linked earlier, I think "websites" as means of expression will probably remain fringe. I suppose they always were, it's just the rest of the web that's grown.

Pontifus mentions shortwave as something that resembles the internet in some key ways, and that's kind of fun. Like a lot of people, I developed an interest in shortwave via the Conet Project in the late 90s. I doubt I was the first person to start sampling them, but I sure as shit did it right away. I nerded out so hard on it that I even bought a radio. Sitting on my rooftop porch in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh, my friends and I listened to some very random stuff until finally coming across what I believe was probably HM01 out of Cuba. That was a magical moment the likes of which I probably won't have anymore. Would I trade our connected world and the magic thingies in our pockets? I dunno, but I miss not knowing about stuff. I think that's why stuff like the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet resonates so much with people. There are so few mysteries anymore — at least the ones that a layperson can really feel like a part of — and it's great to recapture that feeling of sitting on your roof and hearing the spooky radio voice.

Mike· 2 years ago

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What am I playing?

I do get the occasional time to play video games. Here's what I've been into the past few months.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The promise of a top-down, somewhat linear Zelda with all of the flexibility of Tears of the Kingdom is borderline irresistible, and then it’s executed in a cute Link’s Awakening style. Plus you get to be Zelda. Resist it, I dare you!! I couldn’t. It was not super long and it was a lot of fun, though the Echo menu got really long and unwieldy by the end.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

I can see why it got so much love. It’s everything the first game was and a bit more. More force powers, more lightsaber stances, horse(ish) riding, and flying on bats. Yet again, you guide Cal through some amazingly designed landscapes and ancient ruins that really put you in Star Wars. The story is not all that hopeful — it made me think of Empire or even Rogue One. Suffice to say, the Empire is bad. Even if the stormtroopers’ dialog is still funny. Maybe this game's greatest achievement is getting me excited about something Star-Wars-related in 2024.

Dragon’s Dogma II

I bought the first one on sale for Switch at around $5. It’s borderline impossible to say a game of its scope isn’t worth 5 bucks. I didn’t pay full price for this one either, but it was definitely more than that. I haven’t been as taken by it yet — there’s a lot of the inventory and party management stuff that gets old about RPGs to me, same as the first one. But it’s a great looking game and the combat (and gore level) is pretty unique among action RPGs. I’m gonna try to give it a fair shake.

Hades

I’ve never gotten too into roguelikes. If I want to beat my head against a wall repeatedly, I’ll just go straight to Fromsoft. But I loved every previous Supergiant game and there’s barely ever a bad word spoken about this one. So when it was $10 for Switch I grabbed it. Sure enough, it’s a treat. Portable is the perfect platform because you can just pick it up, do a run, and be done. But it’s dangerous: It’s pretty easy to keep saying “Just one more run” way past your intended time. Beats doomscrolling, though.

Baldur’s Gate III

This one’s tough because I love D&D and Forgotten Realms. I love the idea of a mind flayer-centric story. And I love that I can play a Githyanki main character (which I am). It’s deeply customizable and flexible, the turn based combat is some of the best around, and the story and characters really keep getting better as you go. But I don’t love it. At every turn I’m reminded that I’m playing alone — in a game based on something that has very long-held social associations for me. D&D by oneself is maybe just not something I’m into. And frankly, I’m also not that excited to discover when the penis customization becomes relevant.

Mike· 2 years ago

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Happy 85th Birthday to Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos created soundtracks for Tron, A Clockwork Orange, and many more. She introduced millions to the potential of the synthesizer as a "real" instrument via Switched On Bach. And she even worked with Robert Moog on the development of his legendary synthesizer.

Here she is in a fascinating interview on NOVA in 1989 — height of the DX7's reign, but she explains subtractive synthesis on the classic Moog Modular as well as some amazing additive synthesis on a computer.

Mike· 2 years ago

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A mysterious mystery, no longer mysterious

Here's some good and fun news on a day when we could use it. One of the greatest internet mysteries of the past decade has been solved.

Maybe you've heard it on a podcast, or possibly read about it in a news story from Buzzfeed or NPR. But since 2019, a group of detectives have been trying to track down The most mysterious song on the internet, sometimes shortened to The Mysterious Song or TMS.

The song itself is really good if you ask me — it has a goth/post-punk vibe but a strong and catchy hook in the verse. The singer has that doom and gloom gothic voice that might remind you of other post-punk singers like Ian Curtis, Andrew Eldritch, or Rodney Orpheus. The guitars, likewise, do similar things to Joy Division or Echo and The Bunnymen, but there's a Yamaha DX7 adding some additional textures that bring a 1987-88 vibe to what feels otherwise firmly early-80s.

The saga actually begins much further back, when a German kid recorded the song off the radio in (probably) 1984 but never heard the DJ say what it was. His sister started looking for it online as far back as 2007. Here's a good rundown from a subreddit dedicated to the search, including links to deeper explainers and even redditors obsessing over DX7 patches.

The story continues with a lot of rabbit trails, false starts, and even some obscure Greek post-punk musicians claiming the song and uploading the crappy radio recording to Spotify as their own (sad, really; Statues in Motion turned out to be a good band that a lot of folks in the search enjoyed listening to, but their efforts to co-opt the song kind of taint them). But 3 days ago, a user made a post confirming that the creator of the tune, a German group called FEX, was found. To prove its validity, he added a different recording of it to his post. Turns out, the radio version was just a demo, which is why the German radio station didn't retain the tape — it was their policy to toss demos after playing them.

So now we know: the song is called "Subways of Your Mind" by FEX from Kiel, (West) Germany. We have multiple songs from them and at least one of those is also pretty great. They plan to get back together to make a modern re-recording of the tune.

And that's it. On one hand, I can't help but feel a little sadness at one less mystery in the world (the imagination can always create something cooler than reality, of course). But on the other, these guys who had no idea what was going on for the past 5 years are now going to get their due. And there are more lost tunes to find, even if they're not all as famous as this one.

Mike· 2 years ago

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It's democratic values, Charlie Brown

The problem with believing the things about America and democracy that we were taught in school is that a huge chunk of it was untrue, so it's just as easy for the current crop of fashy oligarch bootlickers to say they're the ones pushing American Values. And I can't really enjoy hearing liberals or even progressives say "this is not what America is about," because it is. But the fun thing is, conservatives have always been talking about "getting back to American Virtues" — and people like George Wallace, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump have justified segregation, child labor, and family separation using that kind of language.

Maybe they're more right. After all, conservatism is by its nature status quo at best, regressive at worst, and if you go all the way back to the beginning you get a pretty explicitly white supremacist, patriarchal America where a good chunk of the voting populace are religious extremists.

But then you see something that reminds you that there have always been people trying to push forward and make us our best. And that almost gives me a sense of pride.

No, I don't mean John Brown. Here's some inspiration from the great Charles Schulz. He's a man who fought hard to get a Black character included in Peanuts (even if that character wasn't too distinctive). He espoused Christian values that actually seemed kind of Jesus-y. And he has a nice little inspirational civics lesson for a kid who asked him "What makes a good citizen?" during the Nixon years.

(Via Open Culture)