1854: Next Steps

I bought a piano today. This is not something I thought I’d ever be able to do, but it turns out if you look around a bit, you can actually get a decent (albeit somewhat aged) piano for a very reasonable price.

In other words, if you eschew regular music shops and instead go for a more “direct” approach, you’ll often find much better deals.

I acquired my new piano (which arrives on Wednesday) from a local business called Bryant Pianos. I stumbled across this site during my search for a place to acquire a piano the other day, and decided to pay them a visit this weekend. Bryant Pianos is, it turns out, a business run from home by the eponymous Mr Bryant, who has a workshop full of pianos that he acquires, restores, repairs and then sells on. (Sometimes he acquires, strips them for parts and then sends them off to the great piano graveyard, too.) He’s also a piano tuner — a useful person to know when you have a piano.

Anyway, I made an appointment to pay him a visit, and we did so today. I took a couple of bits of sheet music with me — Chopin’s Preludes and Liszt’s Consolations, if you were curious — and tried a few out. I don’t know an awful lot about different piano makes, to be honest, aside from the fact that the grand piano I grew up with — and which still occupies my parents’ living room — was a good (and expensive!) make because it was a Steinway. I was familiar with a few other makes but not in any great depth; I’d heard of (and probably, at some point, played) Knights, Bechsteins, Rogers(es), Challens and various others, and also knew that new Yamahas were both very nice and well out of my price range for the moment. Bryant didn’t offer any Yamahas, but he had the others, so I gave them a go.

The Rogers was the oldest piano there, hailing from 1906. It had a really nice, rich, full tone and, apparently, weighed an absolute ton, being a distinctly old-school upright piano. Its action was reasonably nice, though it proved a little difficult to control at times, particularly when playing more delicate phrases.

The Challen looked nice — somewhat “school piano-y” in a 70s sort of way — but had a rather clangy timbre that caused me to discount it quite quickly. The action was nice, but it wasn’t the nicest piano there, nor was it the cheapest.

The Knight hailed from the late ’40s and had quite a nice sound, but a slightly rickety action that, a little like the Rogers, made it difficult to control at times. It’s something I could have probably learned to live with, but while there was the choice there, I didn’t see any point in “settling” for something that wasn’t quite right.

The Bechstein, which was the one I ended up going for, had a good sound and a pleasing action. It wasn’t quite as full and rich as the Rogers, but it still sounded good, and, perhaps more importantly, it felt pleasant to play. I went back and tried the others a few times just to make sure, but felt confident that the Bechstein would be more than adequate for my needs. Bryant did say that due to its age — it’s from the ’20s — it probably wouldn’t have a huge lifespan, hence the fact it was one of the cheaper instruments in his workshop, but that it would be fine for a while yet. That’s fine with me; I need something to get started with, then if (when?) the money starts rolling in I can consider upgrading to a newer model. I’d very much like one of those shiny black Yamahas, but I can’t help but feel that’s a while off yet!

I’m looking forward to having a piano in the house again. I’ve had my electric piano for several years now, but it’s just not the same; sitting and playing it on a wobbly keyboard stand with an amplifier of questionable quality spitting and popping at me is all very well and good, but even the small amount of “setup time” required to get that going was enough to make me not play nearly as often as I should. Having a piano at which I can just sit down and play should hopefully change that; I should play more, and, all being well, it’ll form at least part of my 375th career change in my lifetime. So that’s nice.

1755: Dad Rock

I have a playlist on my phone called “Dad Rock”. The title will be fairly self-explanatory to most of you, I’m sure, but for those wondering why I would call it that when I’m not a father (and have no intention of being one, either), the explanation is actually relatively simple. It’s a playlist full of stuff that I secretly quite enjoyed listening to when I was young and impressionable, but which during my teenage years I steered well clear of owing to the fact that it’s not at all cool to be into records from your Dad’s collection. Not that I was cool at all during my teenage years anyway, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, the point is, my Dad Rock playlist contains a selection of stuff from artists like Pink Floyd; Yes; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; and the Electric Light Orchestra. It’s a playlist I intend to build on over time as I recall things from the past that I actually quite enjoyed, and ultimately will become a pleasing collection of somewhat retro music (largely erring on the prog rock side of things) that I can listen to at my leisure.

One of the first albums that I added to the mix was Time by ELO. I’m not entirely sure why this album has stuck in my mind all these years, but downloading a copy and listening to it on the way to and from work recently has confirmed to me that yes, it really is a cracking album and one that I’m very happy to have rediscovered.

Time, if you’re unfamiliar, is a concept album based around the theme of a man from 1981 (the year of the album’s original release, and the year of my birth) who somehow finds himself in 2095. The theme is rather flimsy, to be honest, but it’s a good excuse for a selection of vaguely sci-fi-themed tracks about The Future — or at least The Future as imagined in 1981.

What I love about Time is how unabashedly earnest and unironic it is about everything. It features lyrics that would be used in a cynical, sarcastic or parody manner today, but it takes them seriously. Take this wonderful little bit from Yours Truly, 2095, referring to an apparently emotionless robotic woman that reminds the narrator of someone he left behind back in 1981:

She is the latest in technology,
Almost mythology, but she has a heart of stone
She has an IQ of 1,001,
She has a jumpsuit on,
And she’s also a telephone.

Wonderful stuff. And it doesn’t stop there, but I won’t bore you with too many quotes.

What’s interesting about Time is how its vision of the future actually isn’t too far off the mark in a few situations. The above example from Yours Truly, 2095 is extreme, of course, but the prospect of the latest technology having “being a telephone” thrown in almost as an afterthought is already a reality thanks to smartphone technology and software like Skype. Similarly, these lines from Here is the News accurately predicted the launch of round-the-clock rolling news coverage and the subsequent banality that comes with it when there’s not all that much going on.

Here is the news,
Coming to you every hour on the hour,
Here is the news,
The weather’s fine but there may be a meteor shower.
Here is the news,
A cure’s been found for good old rocket lag,
Here is the news,
Someone left their life behind in a plastic bag.

More than anything else, though, Time is an evocative work that uses a variety of different musical styles, some well-crafted (if occasionally cheesy when viewed through a 21st-century lens) lyrics and some genuinely catchy themes. Despite the fact that the “narrative” of the album is somewhat shaky and unclear, it certainly does manage to evoke an uncommonly vivid image of the future — not quite dystopian in nature, but certainly a rather alien existence to that which we know even now in 2014.

Early in the morning,
The sun was up and the sky was very blue,
Without a warning,
As I looked out, my thoughts returned to you,
A noise in the city made the children run,
And hide themselves away,
And thunder boomed and lightning filled the sky.

Since I’ve always known Time as a complete experience — and there’s very much a feeling of a “journey” throughout the tracks, even if the narrative itself is a little muddy — it’s one of those albums that I absolutely can’t listen to on random play, even though I like most of the tracks individually. It’s a work designed to be experienced as a whole, and it’s one that still — for me, anyway — holds up remarkably well today. So I have a feeling there’s going to be at least a few more journeys to and from work with it blasting from my speakers, yet.

1719: Album for the Young

I made myself a music playlist the other day. Contained therein was a selection of music from my teenage years, which is when I started actually buying CD albums and singles for myself — beginning, as I believe I’ve said before, with Oasis’ Definitely Maybe just a day before (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out.

Like most playlists I make, I was putting full albums rather than individual tracks in there, as I like to have a full selection of music from favourite artists available. Hitting the “Next Track” button is simple enough if you happen to be served up a stinker of an album track, so it is, for me, a case of better to have too much than too little.

Now, here’s where I did things a little differently. Normally, when I put music on these days, as many people do, I believe, I choose a playlist, hit Play, then hit the Shuffle button so I get a random selection of tracks from those that I’ve picked. I could make the time or effort to curate playlists a little more carefully and not have to rely on Shuffle, of course, but I rarely do that these days; the only exceptions have been when I need a particular amount of music, or when I want to choose some very specific tracks to, say, take to the gym or something.

When I selected this playlist and started playing it in the car the other morning, though, I decided that I wasn’t going to follow my usual pattern, and was instead going to listen to the tracks contained therein a full album at a time. If it was good enough for my fifteen year-old self, I’m sure it’s still good enough for me now — and I don’t like to think that the 21st century has given me such an attention span deficit that I can no longer deal with more than one track by the same artist in succession.

I used to enjoy listening to albums when I was younger. True, I rarely did it as an activity by itself — I would usually put an album on while doing homework, or reading, or something like that — but I would usually listen to a whole album once I put it on. This was at least partly due to the fact that the age of music on physical media meant that you had to get up and change a disc (or even cassette, a medium which even made it difficult to listen to a specific song) if you wanted to hear something by a different artist — but it was also due to the fact that even then, I was conscious of most albums — good albums, anyway — being designed as coherent works in and of themselves. Sure, it was the individual tracks you’d tend to hear played on the radio or the television, but a well-designed album had a beginning, middle and end: it took you on a musical journey, and sometimes even told a story.

Listening to these albums this way for the first time in a very long while has reminded me what a good experience it can be to settle down and immerse yourself in just one album; just one artist’s work, the tracks presented in the order they believed that was best, rather than some arbitrary random picker thingy.

Particular highlights of drives this week have included the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go, a favourite of my teenage years that I primarily picked up in the first place because a girl I fancied was totally into it; Propellerheads’ decksanddrumsandrockandroll, an album I never actually owned but always enjoyed listening to; and Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, which remains, to date, a wonderfully “industrial”-sounding album filled with fire, energy and not a small degree of filth. (Not in a sexy way, either; I’m talking the kind of smoky, dusty, grimy filth that belches forth from a factory chimney.)

The latter in particular has been a pleasure to rediscover, at least in part because there’s really nothing quite like it getting mainstream airplay these days; it remains a product uniquely of its time, and listening to it takes me back to the first time I heard Breathe on a school bus, courtesy of my classmate Peter Miles (a noteworthy acquaintance during my school life for being someone who challenged me to a fight that neither of us showed up for, and who was good enough to lend me a long leather coat so I could dress up as a Gestapo agent for a murder-mystery party just a couple of years ago), and discovered that an artist I’d previously written off on the grounds of the fact I didn’t really like their previous single Firestarter was actually rather thrilling to listen to.

So while I’m not sure I’m going to start just sitting down and doing nothing but listening to an album — something that I’ve never really done, even back when iTunes was something we could only dream of — I’m certainly going to be making an effort to use the Shuffle facility a whole lot less when I’m listening to music in the future. There’s an artistry in the construction of a good album, just as there is (arguably more obvious) artistry in the composition and production of an individual track; it’s something that not many people take the time to appreciate these days, so it’s something that I fully intend to (re-)explore a little more in the coming days.

1694: Spinning Some Tunes

When I was growing up, I wasn’t massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn’t like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I’d record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.

At the time, I didn’t feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly “iconic” or defining of the era. I certainly didn’t feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.

Just recently, I’ve been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the ’70s and ’80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it’s led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven’t listened to for literally years now.

I’ve long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I’m able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It’s pretty great.

And I’ve been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more “defining” than I thought. Or perhaps it’s just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy’s Fat of the Land or Mansun’s Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it’s exactly like that, in fact.

I’ve never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it’s been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.

1119: My Deep-Seated and Irrational Annoyance at Clichéd Rhythmic Patterns

I have, as the title of this post suggests, a deep-seated and irrational annoyance at clichéd rhythmic patterns.

By clichéd rhythmic patterns, I mean two specific rhythmic patterns. These are as follows:

…also known as “knock knock-a knock knock… knock knock” or “shave and a haircut, two bits” (don’t look that up on Wikipedia like I did, you’ll fall into one of those Internet research rabbit-holes and end up reading about Denglisch when you’re supposed to be doing something else) and its best friend:

…also known as “bang, bang, bangbangbang, bangbangbangbang, bangbang” or “that annoying football rhythm”.

(Incidentally, you can tell how much these rhythms annoy me from the fact that I took the time to use Logic to actually write them out for inclusion in this blog post. And if they’re wrong… well, I don’t care, because I hate the fucking things.)

I have absolutely no idea why these two rhythmic phrases irritate me quite so much, but it is sufficient to put my teeth on edge any time someone uses them in any context, whether they’re drumming their fingers idly, knocking on my door or hitting a drum. Actually, that’s not quite true; in the case of the second one, I became particularly irritable towards it when I was a music teacher and the various little scrotes I was teaching thought it was both hilarious and incredibly clever to use it every time I asked them to make up a rhythm of their own. (It also, by tenuous extension, brought back painfully embarrassing memories of a year 7 music class back when I was a pupil, where my friends and I thought it would be awesome to recreate the Pink Panther theme using a set of Indian bells we had and then building the rest of our piece off that. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any further than the initial “ding ding-di-ding ding-di-ding” bit in our rehearsal, leading to a mortifyingly awful performance to the rest of the class that was almost completely improvised.)

But yes. Apart from that, I’m not entirely sure why these two rhythms irritate me quite so much, but they really do. I have a suspicion it may be something to do with my own attitude towards creativity and always wanting to see and hear new things. I feel a little uncomfortable when certain things repeat themselves — I feel odd practicing the same piano piece for several days in a row, for example, especially if people are listening; and I even feel peculiar if I watch a stand-up comedian’s DVD and I recognise some of the material they’ve used from previous shows. (Bill Bailey, one of my favourite comedians ever, is somewhat prone to this… though in his case he often starts off a routine in the same way as in a previous show and then veers off in a completely different direction, which is a very effective method of making the audience pay attention.)

With that in mind, then, I think my negative response to the two rhythms above may well be nothing more than me simply wishing that people would be a bit more creative when they’re banging on things rather than using these age-old rhythms that have seemingly been passed down from generation to generation for the sole purpose of irritating people like me.

Or there may simply not be a reason at all. It is an irrational annoyance, after all.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is very simple: if you bang on my door using one of the above rhythms, I will not be held responsible if I accidentally end up banging on your face using the other. With a hammer.

1095: Czerny’s School of Repetitive Strain Injury

I did some actual honest-to-goodness piano practice today. It’s been some time since I practiced “properly” and I’ll admit that it wasn’t for a particularly long session today — I had work to do — but it’s a start at least.

I started learning the piano when I was about five years old and have been playing ever since. Since leaving university — and particularly since leaving the teaching profession — it’s fallen a little by the wayside, though, for various reasons. You never really “lose it” if you’ve been doing it for as long as I have, though — sometimes it just takes a little concerted effort to get yourself back to where you were before.

Why did I let it slide? Difficult to say, really. Poor self-discipline, mostly, but I also attribute it at least partly to feelings of anxiety and depression. If I get depressed, there’s really very little that I find myself actively wanting to do. Many is the time where I’ve spent hours at a time literally just staring at a wall feeling sorry for myself, even though I know how stupid that is, and that I’d probably feel better if I actually did something. As those who have suffered feelings like this will know, though, it’s not always that easy to get up and do something.

Music is a good outlet for such feelings, however, because by its very nature it is able to express a wide variety of complex concepts and emotions without the necessity for any words whatsoever. People more talented at improvisation than I am can just sit down at a keyboard and make something up to reflect the way they’re feeling — as a classically trained pianist first and foremost, however, I find this somewhat difficult and thus tend to rely mostly on music that has been composed for me.

This isn’t a lesser form of expression by any means — it may be slightly less creative, but you can certainly channel those emotions into a piece of music composed by someone else and put your own interpretation on it very easily. Particularly if the piece of music in question is from an era of music where the composers made a point of writing pieces that were particularly expressive and/or open to interpretation. It’s for this reason I’ve always gravitated more towards the Romantic and early 20th century periods than anything else — Baroque music still leaves me cold with its much stronger focus on technical expertise rather than expression, though some Classical period works for me.

Rather than jumping in to something I can’t quite play today, though, I decided to get out the books of technical exercises I got a while back but have underexplored somewhat. I can still run through all the scales back to back (though my accuracy when playing at speed needs some work) but sometimes (all right, most of the time) it’s nice to practice your skills with something that sounds a bit more like an actual piece of music.

I have a few books of technical exercises from composers with difficult to spell and pronounce names like Dohnanyi, Pischna and Czerny — it was the latter’s “Art of Finger Dexterity” books I went for today, starting from the first exercise in the first book. Its position at the front of the book doesn’t mean it’s a particularly “easy” one, mind; it involves rattling up and down scales at high speed in one hand while playing block chords with the other, then later shifting to parallel and contrary motion perpetually-moving semiquaver passages. It is exhausting, but oddly satisfying to play, particularly when you actually get it right. I was expecting my finger dexterity to be much worse than it was having had so much time off from a concerted effort to practice, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself whipping up and down these passages without too much difficulty. Which is nice.

One of the things I’ve felt over the years with the piano is “I’ll never be able to play that” — either because it looks technically demanding, or it’s fast, or it’s in a difficult key, or whatever. With some persistent, consistent and regular exercise, though, I have faith I’ll be able to build my skills up somewhat and perhaps tackle some more adventurous pieces than I have done in the past.

Eventually, anyway. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy playing Final Fantasy and Persona themes for fun!

#oneaday Day 995: Cultural Victory

Can you have too much culture? Can the sum of human creative endeavours add up to too much for someone to take in?

Well, first of all, those are two different questions. The answer to the second one, at least, is “yes”; the former? I’m not so sure.

We’re already at a point where there is so much Stuff in the world it’s impossible to keep on top of it all. Whatever media you’re into, be it books, movies, TV shows, music or games, there’s enough Stuff out there to keep you entertained probably for the rest of your life in just one of those formats, let alone if you, like most people, spread your time between several. Even if you spend your time focusing entirely on one genre within a single medium, you’ll never get to the bottom of the pile. You’ll never “finish” culture. You’ll never see everything there is to see.

Depending on your outlook, this is either a fantastic thing or incredibly depressing news. For many, there’s a degree of “shame” over not having caught up on things that are supposedly “canonical” or “essential” for everyone to have read/seen/played/whatever. The very term “pile of shame” (from which the Squadron of Shame takes its name) is used to refer to one’s backlog of entertainment that has been purchased but not consumed — or, in some cases, the definition is stretched a little to include Stuff that the owner of said pile intends to consume at some point in the future, but perhaps hasn’t quite got around to just yet.

With books, it’s fine. Books are passed down from generation to generation; republished and republished. Today, we can keep a book alive forever by converting it to a digital format and scattering it to the four corners of the Internet. Sure, you lose some of the joy of turning paper pages and that distinctive musty smell they have, but at least the important bit — that’s the work printed on those pages, lest you forget — is immortalised. You can read it on your computer; on your tablet device; on your e-reader; on your phone. You can annotate it and share your thoughts with other people around the world in an instant. Books are just fine.

Music, too, has proven itself to be pretty timeless over the years — for the most part, anyway. Throughout history there has been plenty of “disposable” music, but the true greats endure for years. Look how long the works of Bach and Mozart have lasted — people are still listening to, performing and studying these pieces hundreds of years after they were first composed. In more recent years, look at how the music of artists such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles is still interesting and relevant today. In very recent years… well, it remains to be seen which artists (if any) will leave a lasting legacy on culture, but there will almost certainly be some. (And if there’s any justice, it won’t be anyone who has ever won or been involved with The X-Factor.)

Movies, too, have become increasingly timeless with the improvements in technology over the years. While once a movie only lasted as long as the medium on which it was physically printed, now, like books, we can archive and keep movies forever. Sure, some moviemaking techniques now look antiquated and are unpalatable to modern audiences, but those truly interested in the full history of the medium can trawl back as far as they wish and see how it has developed.

Games, though, are arguably a bit more tricky, as they have an inherent “expiry date” due to the numerous proprietary technologies involved. While emulation technology is getting better all the time, it’s still not perfect, and the legal grey areas surrounding it make it something that some people prefer to shy away from altogether. When you consider “PC” games, too, there’s even titles that are ostensibly on the same platform that will no longer run on more modern technology. Fortunately, there are places like GOG.com who aim to keep these titles alive for modern audiences, but eventually even their remastered, tweaked versions will “expire” as technology makes the next big leap forward. What happens when computers become wearable and we don’t use TVs any more? Will we still be able to play classic titles designed for the flat screen?

With all this, it’s easy to wonder how you can possibly get through all those things that you’re “supposed” to watch/read/see. The answer is surprisingly simple: don’t. Accept the fact that you’re never going to read Great Expectations; you’re never going to see Citizen Kane; you’re never going to listen to anything by The Smiths; you’re never going to get caught up on the Assassin’s Creed series. Cherry-pick the stuff you’re interested in, finish what you start, and don’t feel obliged to jump in to things just because they’re brand new and everyone is talking about them right now. Get to them when you have time to appreciate them rather than rushing through them in the ultimately futile attempt to feel “relevant”.

Crucially, enjoy (or at least appreciate) the culture you consume, whatever medium it’s in. Your tastes are your own, and no-one has the right to try and change them. People can share their own opinions, sure, and these may help sway your thoughts one way or the other, but ultimately your feelings about the things you like and dislike are entirely up to you. There’s no “correct” opinion; no gold standard of cultural awareness you need to aspire to; no “checklist” to complete. The sooner you recognise this fact, the sooner you can get on with working your way through that “pile of shame” — because there’s some great stuff in there that you haven’t discovered yet. And the stuff that is shiny and new right now will still be here in a few years time.

Take your time. Enjoy it. It’s the least you can do for the people who have invested their time, money, blood, sweat and tears into entertaining you.

#oneaday Day 978: This Was A Triumph

The other day, Andie rather luckily spotted that Jonathan Coulton was performing a show in Bristol today. We hadn’t “been out” for a little while, so we decided on a whim to grab some tickets and head along to the performance.

I’m extremely glad we did. It was a wonderful experience. I’ve only ever seen videos of JoCo’s shows before, but being there live was even better — particularly as he was also accompanied by his usual companions Paul & Storm, who also acted as the “warm-up” act.

Paul & Storm are the perfect warm-up act. Blending some light-hearted stage comedy with some genuinely amusing songs, they have a wonderful sense of chemistry with one another and with the audience. They can adapt to the mood of the room at a moment’s notice and engage with hecklers faster than any dedicated stand-up I’ve ever seen. Plus their songs are just plain good — and The Captain’s Wife’s Lament always brings a smile to everyone’s face, however long it ends up going on for.

Jonathan Coulton, meanwhile, is a little more understated than the antics of his friends. His songs are often amusing, but in a way that ensures you have to actively listen to the lyrics in order to “get” them. Some of them assume knowledge of certain mathematical and scientific concepts — he does a love song as sung by Pluto’s moon to Pluto, for example, as well as one about the Mandelbrot Set — but he also does a great job of explaining to the audience what his songs are about.

He describes his music as being ’70s-style soft rock, and beautifully encapsulated this in a self-parodying song in which “soft rock” was used as a not-terribly-subtle euphemism. This piece also included a variety of spectacular, seamless and possibly improvised homages to various popular songs

More than being amusing, though, his songs are clever and often quite touching. Even when he’s singing about scientists destroying the world with robot armies, you know that he’s channelling concepts that the audience can relate to — loneliness, alienation, a sense of not fitting in with “normal” society — and that’s what makes him such a beloved performer among the “nerd” community.

While sitting in that venue this evening, listening to the songs and laughing at the silly jokes, I got a very similar feeling to what I felt when I went to PAX a couple of years ago. A sense of “this is for me. This is something I am a part of, and I like being a part of it.” It’s not a feeling I have particularly often, so I relish it when it shows itself. And that, really, is all I could have asked from this show — I’m happy it delivered.

It’s 3:30am now. I should probably get some sleep. (I’m up so late because I was attempting to finish the latest visual novel I’m playing, Deus Machina Demonbane, but it’s just going on and on and on. It’s good though. Watch out for a writeup on Games Are Evil tomorrow.)

#oneaday Day 874: 21 Hours Left to Get Indie Game Music Bundle 3

As I type this, Indie Game Music Bundle 3 has just 21 hours left on the clock. The package aims to give your ears a good rogering with the soundtracks to Terraria, Plants vs. Zombies, Dustforce, Ilomilo and Frozen Synapse, and is a cheap date, too — it’s available under the fashionable “pay what you want” scheme.

There’s a caveat, though — break the $10 barrier and you get a bunch of extra soundtracks, too. Specifically, you get the following additional albums on top of the already-awesome package detailed above:

Offspring Fling Original Soundtrack — Alec Holowka
Mubla Evol Ution: NoituLove 1&2 and More — Joakim Sandberg
Cardinal Quest Original Soundtrack — Whitaker Blackall
InMomentum Original Soundtrack — Gareth Coker
Impeccable Micro — _ensnare_
Bluescreen Chiptune/Jazz — Protodome
Beautiful Lifestyle — George & Jonathan
Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar — Disasterpeace
Deorbit — Disasterpeace
Gungirl 2 Original Soundtrack — Josh Whelchel
Astroman Original Soundtrack — Jeff Ball
The Blocks Cometh Original Soundtrack — Hyperduck Soundworks
Fittest Original Soundtrack — Zircon
Songs for the Cure ’11 — Various Artists
Songs for the Cure ’10 — Various Artists

You may not be familiar with any or all of the above artists, but rest assured that this is a fantastic bundle to pleasure your lugholes with for 19 and a half hours, covering a wide range of different musical styles. To be honest, it’s worth your money for the fantastic Frozen Synapse soundtrack alone, which is aural sex.

Game music is traditionally a “love it or hate it” sort of thing, though in recent years we’ve started to see a huge shift in attitudes towards it. Whereas game soundtracks were once bleepy-bloopy loops made to fit into the amount of memory it takes to write a single sentence in a Microsoft Word document these days, today they’re impressive affairs that are frequently on par with movies.

In fact, big-budget triple-A video games (particularly those from the West) try a little too hard to be movies, with sweeping orchestral scores composed by the likes of Hans Zimmer. In some respects, these modern soundtracks, while impressive, have lost a lot of the character that game music used to have — by working around the technological limitations of the era, old-school game musicians came up with catchy earworms that you’d remember for years afterwards. This happens much less these days because composers can pretty much run free with whatever they want to do. As an exercise, hum the Super Mario Bros. theme to yourself now. Then hum the Modern Warfare 3 theme. You probably can’t do the latter. (Though you probably can hum the Halo theme, showing that some composers still “get it”.)

Anyway, my point is that soundtrack composers for independently-developed titles such as these tend to “get” what made game soundtracks of the past so memorable much better than those composing for big-budget titles, and these indie composers are then able to apply this knowledge to modern compositional techniques and technology in order to create some truly excellent pieces of music. Some deliberately make use of chiptune sounds; others have their own distinctive aural aesthetic. All are unique. All are most definitely worth your $10.

Grab a copy of the Bundle here.

#oneaday Day 784: Does the Games Press need a “6 Music”?

I was chatting with a few people on Twitter the other day, one of whom was the fine and lovely Aubrey “Chupacaubrey” Norris, better known as Deep Silver’s Information Tarantula and the sender of the best PR emails in the known universe. The main thrust of our discussion was that the games press is seemingly becoming increasingly homogenised, with the latest “blockbuster” releases consistently monopolising coverage to such a degree that smaller games such as those Aubrey frequently represents are finding it particularly difficult to get noticed by big sites like Gamespot, IGN et al.

In practice, the games press is likely no more homogenised than it has been in the past, but the medium it examines has, over the course of the last few years, diversified to such a degree that it’s nigh on impossible for the staff of high-profile outlets to cover absolutely everything — particularly when you throw the burgeoning social and mobile markets into the mix. It’s the “Cambrian explosion of possibilities” that Sim City creator Will Wright talked about back in 2008. On the one hand, it’s great that the audience playing games covers a much wider demographic than ever before. But on the other, coverage hasn’t adapted enough to be able to celebrate the full breadth of experiences on offer. No one site can do that by itself.

Instead, behind the scenes at outlets decisions are made, and those decisions inevitably err on the side of “cover the shit out of whatever is going to be a massive seller this month”. There’s also something of a crossover between the outcome of this decision and the amount of assets tossed out by publishers — those big publishers who are responsible for getting hot new titles noticed and scoring the fat sales figures ensure that absolutely bloody everyone knows about their game by issuing a press release every time they release three new screenshots. (This is not an exaggeration.) This has the side effect of, at times, taking over the front page of press release aggregators such as GamesPress, particularly if the announcements show up in several different languages. Consequently, announcements regarding smaller titles often fall by the wayside.

It’s not just with press releases that this happens, either. At gaming shows such as Gamescom, which I had the pleasure to attend last year, large publishers often throw big events lasting for several hours, which can cut into the valuable time available for journalists to scoot around smaller companies and pick out what are likely to be the “sleeper hits” of the year. And no-one wants to be that one outlet who didn’t cover, say, EA’s press conference.

At the other end of the spectrum, we get the phenomenon of the “indie darling”, whereby a developer which hasn’t followed the same sort of marketing strategy as a giant, multi-million dollar publisher has grown to seemingly disproportionately huge success through viral promotion and word of mouth. It’s great to see this, but again this can lead to the monopolisation of coverage as outlets consistently pick out titles like, say, Minecraft and Bastion to point at any time they want to go “LOOK, WE COVER INDIE GAMES TOO!” Then the problem starts all over again in a slightly different form. Look at all the lists of awards for last year, for example. Most of the awards which celebrated indie games mentioned Minecraft, Bastion or Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. Where was the love for Frozen Synapse? Dungeon Defenders? Sequence? Dungeons of Dredmor? Dustforce?

In many cases, it’s not that these titles don’t get covered at all, it’s more that they’re treated as curios at best, deemed somehow “unworthy” of the excessive amount of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, opinion pieces, previews, multiplayer previews, DLC previews and what have you that the big hitters get. There are occasional outliers — look at the positive effect Jim Sterling’s celebration of Deadly Premonition had, for example — but for the most part, I can see why people like Aubrey get frustrated when they just want people to give the games they represent the attention they deserve. Tom Ohle of Evolve PR — an agency which represents some of the best, most underappreciated games in recent years — wrote an excellent post on this very subject about a year ago.

So what’s the solution? It’s a difficult prospect, to be sure, for coverage of these large blockbuster titles is, in theory, what the majority of the audience wants. The games sell bucketloads of copies on release, everyone is talking about them months before they’re on shelves and reviews often seem like foregone conclusions by the time the embargoes eventually lift. But the trouble with all this is it means that one outlet becomes very much like another. Sure, each outlet has their own distinctive “voices” and some try to make a point of having a “unique” editorial style — sadly, this often translates simply to “snark” or “swearing” — but all of them are generally covering the same things at the same time.

For a possible alternative way to look at things, I looked to a different creative industry with a similar sort of overwhelmingly massive breadth to gaming: music. In the music business, no one outlet attempts to cover absolutely everything. That would be pure folly, quite simply for the fact that it would be literally impossible to do, even with a massive staff. But not only that, the audience doesn’t want that, either. A kid who’s into One Direction and Justin Bieber doesn’t give a toss about what Vladimir Ashkenazy is up to. Similarly, a classical music buff probably isn’t that interested in what Skrillex has to say about his latest beats. All across the music business, coverage is tailored to a specific, more specialised audience according to any combination of popularity, genre and target demographic, with occasional overlap and crossover. This happens with magazines, TV shows, websites and radio stations. It’s been like that for a pretty long time, and it works.

BBC Radio 6 Music is a digital radio station from the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation. It is almost the complete antithesis to the small-playlist, youth-targeted pop-focused station that is the BBC’s flagship station Radio 1. It purports to focus on “alternative” genres of music including indie, folk, rock, punk, funk, blues, soul, jazz, hip-hop and all manner of other disparate (but still “non-classical”) genres, though it doesn’t eschew the mainstream entirely. It is, however, the place to go if you’re tired of hearing a loop of Adele-Katy Perry-Maroon 5-Justin Bieber-repeat, and is regarded by many as a fine example of How To Get It Right. In fact, it is so well-regarded that when the corporation proposed closing the station to provide commercial rivals with more “room” in July of 2010, outcry from fans was so vehement that the BBC Trust rejected the proposals, noting that the station was “well-liked by its listeners, was highly distinctive and made an important contribution”.

But what, you may be thinking, does any of this have to do with the games press? Well, quite simply, why isn’t there a high-profile outlet in the games media performing a similar function to 6 Music? Why isn’t there a successful, “well liked, highly distinctive” games media outlet making an “important contribution” by specifically choosing not to let the mainstream dominate its coverage, instead preferring to delve deeper into the game’s industry’s equivalent of “alternative music” while still acknowledging the blockbusters exist? A site which focuses on, for want of a better word, “single-A” and “double-A” titles to the same degree that every site and their dog has been focusing on Mass Effect 3 for what feels like the last aeon?

The audience is certainly there. I can’t be the only one in the world who would rather read that site than bear witness to the increasingly-predictable coverage provided by leading games sites today. And should the site have the chops to prove itself as a go-to destination for this “alternative” side of gaming — to the exclusion of blockbuster-centric sites for those who prefer to avoid the big titles (or who don’t want to hear about them quite as much) in favour of slightly less well-known fare — there’d definitely be the full support of hardworking PR types. The BBC has the benefit of an established name to promote itself as well as public funding, of course, but there have been stranger success stories.

Food for thought, huh. Perhaps I should just start it myself!