With heavyweights like Trent Reznor being conscripted to score triple-A titles (albeit not an entirely new occurrence ) and swarms of musicians of all stripes clamoring to upload their tunes for play in rhythm games, the comparatively healthy video game industry must seem like an undiscovered country of opportunity and promise to the increasingly bewildered inhabitants of what used to be termed the record industry. As decades-old business models collapse like so many statues of Ozymandias, it’s hard to blame musicians themselves for turning to gaming for new types of exposure and monetization. While there’s nothing new about the crossover between these mediums per se, I’m beginning to see all sorts of interesting applications of it as a music critic, and was keen to delve into one recent example.
I’ve been a record geek for as long as I can remember, and my obsession with music has bled over into how I interact with gaming in innumerable ways. Certain gaming scores, from Bubble Bobble to Shadow Of The Colossus , are forever etched in my mind, with all of the Proustian flashbacks which accompany them. I’ve also built up plenty of associations between games and external music. While I love Skyrim ‘s music, spending over half of a year plugging away at a title can prompt fatigue of even the most inspired scoring, and I’ve spent no small amount of time trying to find the ideal artists with which to augment my Dovahkiinery (a few names: In The Nursery, Agalloch, Shostakovich, In Slaughter Natives).
I’m often playing games while listening to new records I’m planning to write reviews of or scanning for possible club tunes to DJ. One such record was Gatekeeper’s debut LP, Exo. On their first singles and EPs the New York duo had lifted liberally from the nostalgic 80s synth playbook and heaped gauzy atmospheres atop of abrasive, dark electro sounds, and I was keen to hear what they’d do on their first full-length release. My initial passes through Exo left me scratching my head, however. It was different from Gatekeeper’s existing discography to be sure, but it also felt different from most electronic records at a much more fundamental level. The sound design of the record – the production and mixing of specific sounds separate from their rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic elements – didn’t just seem to be Exo’s primary concern, it seemed to be the only concern. Beats were established, but so quickly attracted a bestiary of secondary tics and atmospheres that they almost seemed to become frightened, and gallop off to their next incarnation.
After a few of these furtive listens, I discovered that Exo was meant to be released and experienced in tandem with a video game environment. My initial surprise gave way to the sense that there might have been a reason behind Exo’s flummoxing sound, and listening to the album in a context which scant few bands have attempted (the app which accompanied Björk’s recent Biophilia is a notable recent example) was an inviting prospect. I downloaded the game , dimmed the lights, sat down with some scotch (as per the advice of a friend who’d already run through it), and dug in.
It’s important to state that Exo isn’t so much a game as a designed environment meant to provide a framework in which to experience the album. Player input doesn’t affect the “progress” of the game: you’re simply placed in a first-person environment and left to explore it before being transported to the next stage in time with the movement of the album, which plays in its entirety throughout. You experience the birth, seasons and death of an alien planet, with the album’s brief between-song interludes zipping you back to your ship which (if I’m not mistaken) transports you from one continent to another. Pleasantly, the Exo.exe offers a range of graphics options, and it’s best to err on the side of caution if yr rig isn’t up to current standards (like my old box of bolts), as some of the textures involved can grind things to a halt.
The attention given to an immersive world of pure design for its own sake makes me think of the demoscene , which perhaps isn’t so far off from the which were paired with Gatekeeper’s earlier music on super-limited VHS releases. That said, there’s no attempt to co-opt the demoscene’s love for gobsmackingly efficient, small programs . It may seem counter-intuitive, but by making you download a one gig file, Gatekeeper make damn sure that you give Exo your undivided attention from start to finish.
In an age in which we can carry thousands of albums in our pockets and stream nearly any song we’d care to hear from almost any electronic gadget that’s released nowadays, there’s something uncanny about a video game preventing you from allowing an album to fade into the background as you get distracted by e-mail, commuting, cooking, and, well, video games. Haptic computer interaction brings a whole new dynamic to the “click n’ drag album onto software window, hit play, get distracted” modus operandi by which so many of us live today. Conversely, there’s something almost narcotizing about the way in which environments and tracks tick along in Exo , regardless of your input – I’ll cop to almost feeling like I was playing the hypnotic game in that not-so-great TNG episode (which was a “Wesley saves everyone” episode to boot), or classic CD-ROM games like T he Labyrinth Of Time or Myst (minus the ubiquitous lever puzzles). A video game as a delivery mechanism for an album is something worth mulling over, especially when the relatively relaxed nature of the game provokes the very same impulse to distraction that it’s also circumventing…by tricking your brain into focusing on the album.
Listening to the record on the other side of experiencing the Exo video environment is…different. One feels informed by a preternatural comfort and ease with the album’s humid hothouse of sound, which might have previously felt anxious or skitterish. The wet squelchiness of Exo ‘s moves to acid house, as well as 90s rave sounds, nicely matches the lush and organic landscapes you’ve explored. Tracks bleed into each other with an acquiescent grace, and I found myself wishing the whole thing was mastered as a single track, free of any silence between the passages (and it’s rare that I find myself wanting an album to be more “difficult”).
Perhaps most tellingly, I’m left with a new set of cross-sensory memories. Like playing Street Fighter II still makes me taste the corner store candy I wolfed down while pumping quarters into a machine as a kid, like certain albums now make me think of the Skyrim dungeons I was clearing while playing them, Exo is now indelibly tied to the verdant forests and shimmering caverns I roamed through while listening to it. These sorts of associations have been around since records existed, but gaming now offers musicians a new studio in which to craft them by design.
Buy
Exo
,
download the video environment
, or, if yr feeling lazy, watch/listen to a walkthrough:
Bruce Lord runs
I Die: You Die
,
which covers covers dark electronic, ambient, industrial and other music he likes. This article is a heavily modified version of a post on that site.
Further Reading:
