Month: October 2014

These two styles also estab­lish togeth­er some­thing like lim­its of what I feel is an impor­tant polar­i­ty, as regards videogames – from ‘mechan­ics’ to ‘organ­ics’. Free improv is non-machinic, wob­bly, ani­mal, plant-like, fleshy, etc – rid­ing on pure real-time which is not spa­tialised in the least. Where­as com­put­er dance music is total­ly machinic, total­ly com­putable, total­ly spa­tialised, and has bod­i­ly attrac­tions of a dif­fer­ent sort, which feel essen­tial­ly dis­ci­plin­ing, though not nec­es­sar­i­ly in a bad way. So, I think explor­ing the space between these styles feels excit­ing. There’s a need in videogames, at the very least, to dis­cov­er their organ­ic pole, where dance music’s pat­terns, loops or grooves etc might func­tion as the raw mate­r­i­al from which a new organ­ism can be built. Though the raw mate­r­i­al will need to be cooked first – and its pieces won’t sur­vive the melt. (via Lev­el up: an insider’s guide to mak­ing video game sound­tracks in 2014 – FACT Mag­a­zine: Music News, New Music.)