20 January 2013

Music Music Music

A small update to my album Technoir Classics '78 - '86.
The whole damn thing is available on Bandcamp:


Listen here. Or visit the page itself...

Love Love Love Thud of the Old Plunger

Heaviness of mind and heart pushing through these battering winter winds. Sometimes feeling thick and syrupy, like the solid swirls in a block of marble, cold and inert, only the illusion of forward movement. Yet still ... the sun is out!

Today I'm glad I remembered this old poem, tracked it down, and devoured it...

Cascando

By Samuel Beckett

1
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed
is it not better abort than be barren
the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love
the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3
unless they love you

*

Best known for his plays, then his novels, Beckett was also a life-long if infrequent scribbler of verse. His earliest poems were baroque pieces of jaunty wordplay and opaque symbolism, thinly veiled attempts to tear Joyce's crowd from his head. But he never quite managed this, being always too clever by half, and never empathetic.

But as Beckett aged, his poems grew as spare and trim as the rest of his writing. The above poem comes from a period just before his most fruitful. He is learning to dispense with extraneous details and useless allusions, and cut straight to the bleeding heart of the matter.

It's a great little piece of writing. The sound of an exhausted chest heaving, of a man tired of pretending his unrequited love isn't poisoning him, one breath at a time.

"The grapples clawing blindly the bed of want..."

"The churn of stale words in the heart again..."

"If you do not teach me I shall not learn..."

I like to think it was this poem that made things like Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Happy Days and Company possible. The shape of his sentiment is here, almost fully formed.

08 January 2013

Game Theories: Epic Fails

I was having a late-night discussion with some designers at work about the nature of Succeeding and Failing in games. The question of the hour was this:

"In a narrative-driven or narrative-inflected game, what is a player's threshold for tolerating narrative failures with respect to gameplay."

To illustrate this, consider an exemplary assassination set-up in a typical Assassin's Creed game: You are given a target, and discover multiple approaches to reaching him. After choosing your path, you sneak up on the target and press the final "Attack" button. The assassination animation kicks in ... then cuts to one of the following cinematics:

1. You plunge your blade into the target's chest, killing him. [Success!]

2. You plunge your blade into the target's chest, but the target is wearing an iron vest a la the Man With No Name in "A Fistful of Dollars." Surprise! Your blade breaks. He has tricked you. After you wrestle, your target escapes. [Failure!]

3. You slam your fist down, but your target slips to one side at the last moment. The blade misses completely and slams into the ground. Your target rolls away and escapes. [Failure!]

Two of these scenarios end in narrative failure, one in success, and yet, in all three the gameplay loop is exactly the same -- the planning, approach, the execution of the attack. In all three cases, the player can be said to have "played the same game."

06 January 2013

Technoir Classics '78 - '86

New Music for a New Year!

Download Autographic's "Technoir Classics" right here.

Some background: I started composing the beats for this album on an MPC-500 back in August of 2010. I was in the process of dismantling my life in Seattle, preparing for a move to New York. Most of the work was done late in the evening, sitting on a mattress on the hardwood floor of a naked room bathed in the light of "Logan's Run" and "Soylent Green" playing on my laptop.

Three weeks later I was in Spokane, staying with my parents for a few weeks before heading East. I set up a small studio in their basement and began recording most of the basic backing tracks. But this process only got me about halfway to the finish.

Then something unexpected happened: I stumbled into a job in Montreal, just 4 days into my drive to NYC. It's a long story, but it resulted in work on the album being suspended for quite some time. I didn't dive back into recording until after I had finished work on "Assassin's Creed: Revelations", a project that consumed my life for almost a year.

At last, by late 2011 I returned to the album, and over the course of 10 months, dedicated a few hours a week to finishing it.

So it's done. It's fun. It's lo-fi. And it's a messy tribute to a few of my favorite things: The early 80s hip-hop and Electro scene in NYC, and the Technoir films of the 70s and 80s.

Enjoy.