Partial Blackout

I've been real busy lately. I'm getting married in less than a week, so it's been hard to keep up. Here's a few I recently wrote:

Populous and Short Stories- Drawn in Basic

Max Richter- 24 Postcards in Full Colour
More on that one soon, I hope.

Adventure- Adventure
Although I don't think my article makes its case that well, it was interesting to see an essay by Simon Reynolds for The Guardian reference the same idea of background sounds in childhood television as instructive electronic tools (as discussed in this article about the BBC Radiphonic Workshop). I think 8bit chiptune music, like the Nintendo songs heard on endless loop during childhood play, were equally the base of electronic music fanaticism. The fact that the Nintendo experience was more tactile just reinforces the intimacy of the connection to electronic sounds, which were at one time totally weird and progressive. That the airwaves were peppered with new electronic sounds as new wave, freestyle, and even soft rock was overtaken by Casio and Roland, and television and film composers fired their orchestras and hired a single synth player to score the mess of 80s action and comedy, is secondary. Nintendo sounds produce Pavlovian responses because they were directly linked to the adrenaline and endorphins released under the tension of game-playing.

For more on BBC Radiophonic Workshop, see The Alchemists of Sound documentary in its entirety on Youtube (under the user's video. See part one below)



Also check out:
Make Believe Maverick by Tim Dickson (Rolling Stone)- A total smear to be sure, with its share of distortion, but still a concise biography of a man who has used a cozy relationship with the media to win popular support around a biography that's not even remotely accurate.