I love this video of a live “performance” by Blondie of the song “Denis” on a Dutch TV program from, I would think, 1978. I don’t know what the story is here, but there’s something appealing about seeing Debbie Harry just stand dead still while multiple televisions around her show proper (from the same show?) live performances of the song. The video inter-cuts between those which is a shame because just watching her stare at the camera with an air of displeasure would have made it all the more absurd. Somehow it seems more genuine then the mostly lip-synced performances of the era, perhaps owing a little bit to Blondie’s oft-overlooked punk origins.
Well, this was a pleasant surprise for a rather cool November afternoon: Bookmat has not one but two new Jahtari releases available for purchase and download. These came as a complete surprise, partly because Jahtari does a poor job with their site: not only was there no word that these were coming, but there still isn’t any word that they even exist.
First, there’s Tapes’ “Hissing Theatricals” which is a brilliant, if brief, foray into lo-fi 8-bit dub patterns, with an added cassette transfer hiss for that extra bit of texture. It’s very much in that Disrupt style but a little more, I don’t know, focused? The mp3 release costs only three pounds so it was an instant impulse purchase for me, especially after hearing the sample for “Gold Love Riddim.” It’s fantastic and worth the cost of the album on its own.
I love Boomkat, but their often sycophantic and overly enthusiastic reviews are some times a little too much. Every other album is massively recommended, a career definer, an essential purchase, three exclamation marks! etc. This is what happens when the reviewer is also the seller. That said, in this case, the album hits all my right buttons and I agree with their sentiment: Massively Recommended!. If I were to make another Bleeping mix, this would be featured front and centre. Hell, it even uses a Capcom opening chime sample — think Street Fighter 2 — which, coincidentally enough, I recently used too.
The second release is an EP between the man himself, Disrupt, and Glasgow MC Soom T. They’ve collaborated before and an entire performance can be heard on Jahtari’s site: Disrupt Live w/ SOOM T at Glasgow Art School. The track “Dirty Money”, from that live set, is what I ended my “Beep-Side” with. It was a bit rough and raw then, but it’s been given the title track treatment for this EP and it’s a lot more cohesive now. Filling out the rest of the EP are two other vocal tracks on the EP, and two instrumental dubs.
It’s a good collaboration with some good jams, but it’s a bit in your face. I’m just not naturally drawn to vocal stuff unless it’s really good, distorted, or just much more in the background. Which is why if I want to hear female vocals over 8-bit dubs I’ll more frequently turn to the low-key stylings Illyah & Limited Candy’s “Machines and Ghosts EP”. Unless I’m sticking it to the man, or Ken, then “Dirty Money” would do.
I was up on Friday morning and rode out to Gare du Nord to catch an early Eurostar train to London. The trip from Paris to London is about two hours total which, for someone that grew up with the vast distances of Ontario, is mind-boggling. It’s a comfortable, easy ride and really the more civilized way to go. Sure, it’s more expensive than flying and takes twice as long in transit, but the overall experience is quicker since both train stations are located centrally, so you don’t need to go through the extra hassle of going out to the boonies to get to an airport, and you don’t have to deal with all that airport bullshit. The entire check-in process, including passport control and security, took less than five minutes.
My first order of business in London was to make my way to the Pixel-Lab’s Playful event. It was two tube stops from the station, but I decided to stretch my legs and walk it, without a map, and with the faintest of directions. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve last been in London, when I spent three months there, but it easily could have been two weeks. Everything was instantly recognizable and navigable and despite the unfamiliar destination I managed to find my way without getting lost. Screw Google Maps, Human Brain™ is the real impressive application.
I arrived at Playful during the first break and stayed for all subsequent presentations. It was hit or miss. Some people were clearly not too comfortable in front of a crowd, others were just reading out their script, and others were engaging and entertaining. Russell Davies‘, James Bridle’s, and Rex Box’s, somewhat clunky but amusing overhead projector and transparencies powered, presentations were the standouts.
Russel Davies presents
During the lunch break, after a bit of Twitter-tag, I met up with Alex aka. rotational in what would be a precursor to many internet people first meetings. As they say on that side of the Channel, he was a good chap. We talked about the conference, writing for games, the magazine gaming business, and the internet like all true nerds would.
After the conference I headed towards my London City hotel, again by foot. The streets of London are far more stressful than the streets here in Paris. It was the evening rush-hour, already dark, and the hustle and bustle of the place felt very North American to me. I could feel my blood pressure rising just by being surrounded by it. Maybe I’m projecting, as I’m living a very casual, laissez-faire life over here.
I eventually found my hotel, just around the corner from the Eurogamer expo, and to my pleasant surprise I found that I had been upgraded to a deluxe suite. It was wonderful. A room more than five times larger than my current apartment. A large screen TV, two desks, a sofa, a speaker above the toilet so you could listen to the TV while you took a shit, and a cavernous shower larger than the entirety of my current washroom. I knew I wouldn’t want to leave.
So I didn’t and I skipped the Eurogamer Expo for that day while I relaxed and, later in the evening, headed out to The Crosse Keys pub nearby for the Indie Arcade Show & Yell arcade where I would meet up with more internet people, mostly consisting of those weird and crazy people of the Idle Thumbs forums including one of the organizers of the event, David aka. Nachimir. It could have been a disaster of an event — the plasma screen in the venue, specifically chosen because it had a plasma screen, didn’t work, putting a kibosh on any potential showing — but David’s tireless efforts to salvage it with a crowd of drunken indie devs and a megaphone turned it into a fun, if a bit disorganized, yelling match.
Joe Danger shown at the Indie Show & Yell, held up as some sort of monument to indiedom.
After a wonderful sleep and breakfast in the hotel I met up with Aubrey and we headed for the Eurogamer Expo and, not surprisingly, straight for the Indie Arcade. This tiny room with a bunch of PCs had more creativity and heart than the rest of the expo. There I played Joe Danger, easily one of the best games of the show, and chatted with the nice Hello Games people. Terry Cavanagh and Alex May, other swell chaps with whom I’d play 4 player Super Mario Bros co-op later in the day, were there to show VVVVVV and Euphloria, respectively. There was Time Fcuk and Squid Yes! Not So Octopus! and Super Yum Yum and Shooting Starcade. Leaving this little room and entering the vast spaces where the “mainstream” games were held was shocking in its contrast.
Indie Arcade
The problem with shows like this, where a lot of different games are placed within view of each other, is that they reveal just how same-y most of them actually are. No where was this more evident than in the 18+ basement where God of War 3 sat next to Dante’s Inferno. As I watched Aubrey fight some enemies by aimlessly swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus menaced in the background, I looked behind me to see, in a completely different game, someone fight a bunch of enemies by swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus was pissed off in the background. Then I played Bayonetta and I fought a bunch… stone colossus. It was all very depressing.
There was a Street Fighter IV machine — actually, a Playstation 3 inside a Taito arcade cabinet (?) — that was drawing crowds and, in the basement, a the Wii fighter Capcom vs Tatsunoko. Some dude was hogging the game, taking on all comers. I grabbed the second player Wii arcade stick (didn’t know there were any) and picked my characters and then that dude proceeded to unleash multiple ten billion point of damage, literally, combos on me before I could even figure out how to do anything. I managed to get about two punches in the match and quickly left in disgust. This one moron did more to dissuade me from ever looking at this game than anything in the actual game itself. Way to go!
Street Fighter IV: moment of defeat.
Heavy Rain was in the basement, which was too good for it. It should have been under the basement, dismantled, buried in concrete to be forgotten for a thousand years.
The game of the show, as far as I’m concerned, was the one that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or racing: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. If you were to judge all games at the expo by the amount of laughter and camaraderie from its players, as opposed to the typical, solitary dead stares most had, Super Mario Bros was the clear winner (Left 4 Dead 2 was second.) The simultaneous four-player co-op was a fun, competitive and cooperative, tour de joy. Much like the indie stuff, it stood out amongst the crowd as a sole beacon of colour. I just wish they didn’t use two Toads for players three and four.
3D videogames: making you look like even more of a nerd.
Afterwards, there was another pub session. The joys (and hats) of Hook Champ were often cited.
Sunday afternoon was lazy and rainy, spent mostly on a sofa with Street Fighter IV, Geometry Wars 2, and Channel4’s Peep Show. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Lady of Shalott while I was in London, but I was tired and this was the most suitable end to the weekend before the evening train ride home.
Unfortunately, the entire trip made me miss my game consoles even more. Once a gamer…
Excuse the journaly nature of this entry.
Heavy Rain really was complete shit. I’ll probably elaborate on this later.
I stayed at the Apex London, which I recommend for obvious reasons. But I’d probably still recommend it if I wasn’t upgraded to a larger suite since the staff there was friendly and helpful.
In trying to remember what videos I enjoyed this decade that weren’t on the list I turned to two places: my YouTube favourites, and my delicious bookmarks. The YouTube favourites were mostly a bust as they were almost entirely made up of old 80s and early 90s videos that were suffixed with the all-too-common Video is no longer available mark. delicious proved more fruitful as the video + music tag intersection gave me a pretty good zeitgeist for most of the decade. I say that having just realized that as of next month I’ve been a delicious user for six years, so it’s a pretty good indicator for most of my tastes through the decade.
What follows is a list of all the music videos that I bookmarked there over those years that aren’t already on antville’s top 100. Some were chosen for the video itself, some for the music, and others for weird cultural reasons (ie. mostly videogame and/or internet meme-ry).
Here’s a B-Side I made to the previous Bleeping Beats mix that includes some new stuff, some stuff I couldn’t really fit in previously, a few goofy things, and some live performances that are a little raw and rough around the edges, all wrapped in a slight early-90s arcade vibe. (Though for all the fighting game references, I didn’t include anything off of Disrupt’s “Samurai Shodown”/”Last Blade” 7″, but it is freely downloadable at Jahtari).
I don’t have anything to say about this one except to note that this will be the last such mix for a long, long time. I’ve burned through my reserves and any further attempts would be repetitious. Besides, I’ve reached my limit for this wonkiness and I’m now purging my system with some ambient drones, and “hauntology”, and spacey synth lines. So good.
That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s mechanically simplistic too, only allowing you to move left and right and awkwardly jump. But that’s enough. Through your own explorations it slowly reveals the world and leaves it to the player to infer what happened and what is happening, building on all of that towards an effective ending. A simple story, but one well told within the confines of the system. And one that is told by the players’ own actions.
When I talk about narrative via gameplay, amongst the likes of Super Metroid and Left 4 Dead and others, this is exactly what I mean. It’s an extreme example, stripped down to the barest of elements, but a persuasive one.
EA’s Fifa Earth is neat. A Flash based real-time visualizer of stats and trends from games played in Fifa 10. I’m down with stuff like this. It’s ambient information that fits somewhere between the stat heavy specifics of something like Halo 3 and, well, nothing. Indirect stats like this always give a little extra life …
A couple weeks ago I posted a 40 minute mix on nerd music (you can download it here) that focused on (mostly) instrumental hip-hop and dub(step) musicians that incorporate the chiptune sound in their music. The genesis of this mix goes back to the end of August. I started compiling some tracks, quite a few …
The God of High Score Legacies
Going through some backlog material I noticed that the above video hadn’t been posted, here or elsewhere. It really should be because of its videogame theme (I do like those) and, more so, because it’s so weird and borderline creepy. A paper-made animated tribute to an imaginary deity that watches …
Coming from Nick Stumpo, whose abnormal behavior child (abc) I fondly remember as one of the early paragons of the emerging flash/web/motion design scene back when Flash 5 was still fresh, is Fatty Bum Bum. An installation slash game Flash piece by Hanazuki for the Cinekid festival.
From a game design perspective, Fatty Bum Bum is …
BEAK> is a new project by Geoff Barrow, of Portishead, and two other guys. Extracts from their upcoming album can be listened to, in full, and purchased on their Bandcamp site.
If you liked Portishead’s “Third” or, more correctly, the parts of it that were compared to the likes of The Silver Apples and Sunn O))) …
I bought CodeWeaver’s Crossover yesterday in an impulsive moment of “I miss some of my PC games” boredom. Based on open source project WINE, Crossover theoretically lets you play numerous PC games on your Mac without having to boot into a separate Windows installation and all the crap and space that entails (including the requirement …
Fans of the Toronto independent videogame scene should immediately be directed to the Playstation store. Capybara’s Critter Crunch is now available for download and purchase. I can’t vouch for the game itself, being Playstation-less over here, but I can vouch for the company so give them your hard earned money.
Critter Crunch launch trailer
The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That …
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
