Playcount: 50 times and counting

Not too long ago, it was announced that Akira Yamaoka joined Grasshopper Manufacture, teaming up with the likes of Goichi Suda alias Suda51. (Go = 5, Ichi = 1.) Suda51 likes assassins (he made a game with seven of them), toilet humor, Franz Kafka, punk rock, and lucha libre; in No More Heroes, there is an important secondary character that has his looks based primarily on Ian Curtis of Joy Division (RIP), and his company logo is emblazoned with the words PUNK'S NOT DEAD.



In short, a pretty swell guy. But that's not what this is about.

Akira Yamaoka counts Sparkster (Genesis, 1994) and Hideo Kojima's Snatcher as some of his early stints at composing, but most people simply know him for his work on the Silent Hill soundtracks. This is my upfront disclaimer - I am not a very manly man, and I have never been able to play any form of survival horror, the Silent Hill games included. Having said that, I enjoy Yamaoka's contributions to the series, often relying on guttural, industrial sounds to match Silent Hill's decrepit, bloody and rusted palettes. He's also responsible for the game's theme songs, and this one, from the introduction to Silent Hill 3, has taken my eardrums hostage.


It was also used in the credits sequence at the end of the Silent Hill film, which is where this comes from.

Seeing that three of the four (numbered) Silent Hill games feature male protagonists (SH3's Heather is the sole female), it's peculiar that so many of the game's theme songs feature a feminine element to them. Yet that's what ends up happening anyway; female vocalists, female names in song titles, and what sounds like a woman sobbing towards the end of the first game's legendary intro - you'll recognize those trills anywhere. You're Not There's vocals feature Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, and you only need to click that link to see just how many pies have this woman's hands in them. She's also got a decent pair of lungs too, which she goes on to employ in SH4's Waiting For You to even better effect.

There's always an edge to Yamaoka's work, though, standing out even in something as anthemic as You're Not There. I don't have the necessary education in music theory to tell you why, but it's almost always present in the themes he ends up composing, in the choice of minor chords and the way they progress - there's almost a longing to them, as though the song itself were questing towards some kind of personal truth in an attempt to make sense of it all - perfect summaries of the games they seek to represent, if nothing else. Yamaoka's capable of doing it without ever relying on a single voice, weaving narratives entirely out of guitars, pedal effects and strings - listen to SH2's Theme of Laura and tell me that doesn't inspire some kind of montage.

You're Not There doesn't really inspire any montage; it's a no-nonsense driving anthem of a song, barreling forward with abandon while Mary croons on about a lover that grows more distant with each day. Lyrics jump out - I'm strung out, my body aches, I feel your stress - these resonate with me more than they should, having spent the better part of the last two weeks clocking in some long hours at the office, and working weekends. It shouldn't be any surprise then, that it's surged ahead of my usual picks for demanding times at the workplace.

And who has time for tears?

DOWNLOAD: Akira Yamaoka feat. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn - You're Not There

I've mentioned various means of music discovery in the past - Last.fm's Similar Artists feature is pretty decent, or Musicovery, but never something quite as pure or as hilarious as this.



Meet the Wreckommender. It recommends stuff you will probably hate.

Found at http://wosblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/in-your-electronic-arms/



Laurie Anderson's O Superman may have had a resurgence towards the start of this millennium, no thanks to its incredibly coincidental lyrics - but don't let that color your perception of this video, in which the song's monotonous digital heartbeat sets the stage for one person's perfect game of Snake, edited to great effect to resemble life itself - the infinite possibility of childhood and adolescence, the routine of adult life, an inspired mid-life crisis sequence smack dab in the middle, and finally twisting itself into knots in an attempt to avoid the crushing inevitability of the end.

Fair warning; it's a nine minute long video. I watched it through to the end anyway. So might you.

It is statistically probable that you have not been exposed to any cheesy guitar solos, prog rock or yodeling today.

That changes now.



(That's Gladys Knight introducing them apparently)

Focus - Hocus Pocus (studio version)

Mark Ronson takes one of my favorite tracks of last year and turns it into a slow burner, throwing in his trademark horns while channeling reggae and bits from the Gorillaz' first album. It'd sound thoroughly at home in a carnival devoid of human life, with the lights still on, while bumper cars and Ferris wheels ferry ghosts around.

Then somewhere along the way, ol' Mark decides that there isn't enough Old McDonald Had A Farm in this hizzouse and turns that carnival into a zoo instead, liberally sprinkling bleating goats and monkey noises over the whole affair. BECAUSE THE TITLE OF THE SONG IS ANIMAL, ¿COMPRENDE? It's still a great listen. That's how good Miike Snow is.



Download it at RCRD LBL

If you've ever wondered why you're listening again (inadvertently or no) to Phantom Planet's California / The Fray's How To Save A Life / Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars / any of Paramore's songs AGAIN in your short, short existence, you can generally owe your thanks to one woman.

Meet Alex Patsavas, music director for The O.C. and Grey's Anatomy, and countless other shows. She's also the person responsible for the soundtracks to both Twilight movies, allowing women everywhere to shout "OMG I LOVE THIS SONG" every time they hear Iron & Wine's Flightless Bird American Mouth without ever having listened to anything else that Sam Beam has ever touched.

I sound like I despise this woman - but I don't, for all of my griping. It's hard to dislike someone with taste like this, and who has supervised for shows like Life On Mars. It goes beyond that though. Here's someone who's corralled big media and made it do her bidding, projecting powerful new music to unsuspecting audiences throughout the world. As someone who started poking around for new music thanks to film soundtracks like Garden State's, I only have people like Alex to thank. So if even one person ends up searching for more of Bon Iver or St. Vincent thanks to the New Moon soundtrack, that's good enough.

But I still never want to hear The Fray again.

Alex Patsavas was recently interviewed on The Sound of Young America.

There's really only two ways to interpret Bayonetta's stance on sexism.

( snip )

Even weekend overtime fixing major bugs on what was formerly a pleasantly long weekend can be made tolerable when one is too busy laughing at a parody of a Pixies song over and over again, never mind that its subject matter is 13 years old.

Self - Titanic

Titaaanic, Titaaanic, Titaaanic / a big, big boat!



While we're on the topic of the Pixies, Sound Opinions recently poked at Doolittle and got Black Francis to weigh in. You'll never hear anyone in the music business that will ever talk this straight - Black is humble, forthright, and honest to a fault, as he admits that even he doesn't know what he's writing about at times, and to this day he can't tell you the significance of Here Comes Your Man's titular chorus.

Sound Opinions Album Dissection: The Pixies' Doolittle, with Black Francis

LISTEN

More recently, after viewing Coraline and Where The Wild Things Are, my brother and I got to talking about whether we'd let children watch these films. A purely theoretical discussion, as most of our younger cousins are quite well into their teens, accompanied with deeper voices and such.

Coraline's a strange beast that quite happily lounges in a very Victorian sort of darkness, from a time when you were hardly expected to live past 16 and when you were in bed dying of a cold, you were supposed to do it with a certain grace and a brave face and even gratitude for dying pure and untainted - the kind of virtues that J. M. Barrie's mother espoused when mourning the passing of Barrie's young sibling, the result of which would lead Barrie into living the rest of his life in a body that was no older than that of a 13 year-old's. These very same virtues were embraced by Barrie, distilling them into his enduring fictional and immortal protagonist; you might have heard of him, his name is Peter Pan.

Tangents aside, I enjoyed Coraline immensely, willful protagonist and circus mice and all, which doesn't stop it at all from horrifying leagues of children with its proposal of body horror, amongst other things. Observe:

"The following afternoon, Gaiman reported to the nursery, where there was a long crafts table covered with bins of pompoms, googly eyes, and crayons. ... Gaiman stood at one end of the table.
"I wrote 'Coraline,' " he said.
"Yay," a few of the children said, mechanically.
Gaiman ventured that some of them might have seen the movie and been frightened.
A tiny five-year-old in a cape looked up. "I was scared by it," he said. "I was really scared."
"My cousin, who's one, she was screaming," another child said.
Gaiman changed the subject. "This is a story I wrote because sometimes my hair gets a little bit weird," he said, and read them "Crazy Hair." They listened silently. "I'm Neil Gaiman," he said when he had finished. "I'm the author." The children resumed coloring, and Gaiman left, to participate in a panel on his own roots as a fan."

And yet my brother and I mutually agreed that Coraline, frightening as it may be, is at least worth showing to a kid, if only because we think children are a little braver than we give them credit for, a point that Gaiman maintains in that very same article I quote above; adults are more afraid of Coraline than children are. Go and read the New Yorker piece on him, it's good stuff.

Likewise, my brother and I would never in our right mind recommend Where The Wild Things Are to any kid, regardless of whether they're a kid in person or a kid at heart. Where Coraline takes its inspiration from Victorian children's tabloids, blunting the tip of their morality tales to fit in a happy ending, Where The Wild Things Are makes no such accordances; at times, it wades quite knowingly into even darker territory. I've not read the book (blasphemy, I know) but I believe it when Spike Jonze says that he did not set out to make a children's movie but "to make a movie about childhood". Which is what it ultimately does, and it shows no hesitation in translating all that prepubescent angst and conflict to the silver screen, convincingly and unflinchingly.

I also geeked out over the trailer because hey, Arcade Fire.

Can you tell a trickster story without telling a single lie?

Eugie Foster's When Shakko Did Not Lie takes a shot at it. It's short, it's cute, and it's a thoroughly archetypal kitsune folktale in the style of Watership Down's own tales of El-ahrairah. Go listen.

(SCENE: In the elevator on the top floor, doors closing and about to go down, when an EMPLOYEE from the bank hops in.)

EMPLOYEE: Going up or down? ... Of course we're going down, we're on the top floor.

ME: Unless you plan on taking this to heaven.

(EMPLOYEE laughs.)

EMPLOYEE: So hold on, if we're going down...

In about 3 pages, Alexander Gambotto-Burke deftly makes the case for why we need real stinkers like Daikatana, Trespasser, Fahrenheit and, yes, even Mirror's Edge, while simultaneously explaining why I'm utterly stoked for next month's release of Heavy Rain; because it's better to make a few mistakes in the process of making something new, than to drive a good and proven thing into its own grave.

Did I mention he's funny?

"Several months ago, I buried John Romero. I dug a little hole for him in the garden, covered it with dirt, and said a few poignant words over the spiteful-but-soothing strains of Paul McCartney's Too Many People. It was an emotional moment for me, because I really loved the guy. We'd had some great times together: the time, for instance, that his home was destroyed and we went out to get a new one. Or the time he chased his girlfriend around for over an hour, before finally taking a nap in the miniature Taj Mahal nearby. Mostly, though, I just remember him pressing his face up to the water jet, his jet-black, silky, slimy mane billowing out like a raven's wing. He was a spectacular goldfish.

To allay any suspicions that I named a Black Moor after one of the games industry's most storied figures just so I could write a piece like this at some point in the future: my daughter named him."

Go read Charge That Windmill, and when you're done, go read everything else the guy has written, right down to his piece on roleplaying in MMOs that put me in full-on those-were-the-good-ol'-days wistfulness.

I've never felt so tempted to ram the back of a car, to swing the driver's seat door wide open to send some motorcyclist spilling onto the street, swearing and slinging racial slurs as fast as I can breathe them, blaring Gnarls Barkley the entire time through a stereo that doesn't rumble so much as it clatters, as though the entire car were going to come apart.

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Probably...

I would like to blame it on this entire week. It probably deserves it. But the truth is that I only have Chuck Palahniuk (he of Fight Club fame) to thank.

Go read Rant. It's like fanfiction for games like Burnout and Destruction Derby. Think of the rabies as a bonus.

In memory of family and friends who have lost the battle with cancer; and in support of the ones who continue to conquer it! Post this on your LJ if you know someone who has or had cancer.

In recent days I've been mulling over picking up WoW again, what with constant chatter of Cataclysm and the like - I have been using Earth Eternal as a surrogate game for those cravings, which, if anything, only makes me want to go back to WoW even more.

It's in the middle of traipsing through generic countryside that I stumble upon an article that quietly encapsulates everything that stopped me renewing my subscription all those years ago - but not before thinking "I'll read it after I kill this guy", catching myself thinking that, slapping myself a few times and reading the whole article start to finish before logging out without the slightest hesitation.

The reason I left Azeroth all those years ago?

It became work.

In between people attempting to cut me off at queues and being overcharged for lunch atop a general lack of sleep, I am a very grumpy individual. All snippy. Going to work in plain black attire seems only fitting in retrospect.

Yet I can't help but grin at the sunniest darned magazine cover I've toted about in a while, that I've more or less had on me the entire day, all cheers and rainbows with its video game katamari collage rolling across the surface of a gradient-filled sun.



It's even more blinding in person.

Now go and dance to Radiohead.

If Interpol were to simmer the hell down and make a concept album about unfurnished apartments, while hanging out with Portishead, it would sound like The xx.



It's nice to know that you can still make a mood album, meant to be listened to from start to finish, even in these shuffle-mode days.

I haven't written anything at all about the year in music (or even the decade), partly because everyone else has summarized it far better than I could, partly because you couldn't fire up your browser or pick up a magazine without being dogpiled by lists and partly because I love indulging my favorite sin (it's the one that is also an animal). Mostly though, it's because I prefer to look forward. New Klaxons record? LCD Soundsystem in March? POSSIBLE ARCADE FIRE?! yes plz.

But I may as well put down some choice picks from last year. It wasn't without its share of stinkers - the Peter Bjorn & John and Kings of Convenience records come to mind - but for every disappointment that old favorites have wrought, new favorites have sprung up to take their place, taking their place alongside old staples.

I present to you, the MMIXtape.

[ ] Nice dress, love your hair.
[ ] We'll be out of town that weekend.
[ ] It would be no trouble at all.
[ ] I seem to have forgotten my checkbook.
[ ] This will only take a second.
[ ] I don't love you anymore.
[ ] I'll be fine.
[ ] It's not important.
[ ] The girls in the office smoke.
[ ] Someone must have run into me while I was parked at the Safeway, picking up a chicken to roast for dinner for when your mother comes this weekend.
[ ] I have no idea how that got here.
[ ] I'm with the press.
[ ] I never watch TV.
[ ] I didn't get your message.
[ ] I thought you said 'the 16th'.
[ ] I didn't go home that way.
[ ] You're the first.
[ ] It doesn't matter.
[ ] I got it on sale!
[ ] It must have gotten lost at the cleaners.
[ ] We had a wonderful time.
[ ] He's just some guy from work.
[ ] Being married to you is present enough.
[ ] I'd love to help!
[ ] It's on the way.
[ ] Come casual.
[ ] I've already eaten.
[ ] The electricity went off and I had to throw out the rest of the ice cream so it wouldn't melt and make a mess all over the freezer.
[ ] But you're so good at it!
[ ] I sent it yesterday...
[ ] I'm almost done.
[ ] This is a true story.
[ ] Would I lie to you?

~~

Add your own.

Heard on the wonderful Confused Couples episode of Selected Shorts.

Listen or download.