I’ve been trying and failing to learn how to play guitar since high school. No matter how many classes I take or Rocksmith sessions I play, the seeming complexity of the instrument always scares me away from any higher level practice. Now, to add salt to the wound, I’m being upstaged by birds. But t
We like to talk about games in the context of all art and culture. If you agree, consider backing our Kickstarter! /// Grimes destroys the male gaze. And the female gaze. If you will, the human gaze. Can’t stare right at her or you’re blinded, petrified. So Art Angels invites you to stare around the
A computer doesn’t forget, it deletes. Its memories do not drop off the candle’s wick. Everything discarded is done so by some purpose, the will of the user or an overloaded failure of the hardware. People’s sense of memory can be more convenient; we can amplify the emotions of one moment to captiva
In the battle of Bieber and One Direction, everyone wins. Clayton Purdom (CP): David, defend One Direction. David Rudin (DR): I’ll get to One Direction, I promise, but first I want to discuss Backstreet Boys and Take That, because no boy band really exists in a vacuum. We like to imagine them as suc
A lot is going on at The Chinese Room at the moment. Perhaps not as much as before Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was released, or necessarily more than any other studio out there, but what is going on is being documented in surprisingly personal and honest blogs. This is going to start off grim an
Steve Reich composes music for humans, and good music at that. You could, however, be forgiven for thinking that there is something mechanical to his work. Phasing, the technique most commonly associated with Reich, involves the same sequence being played at gradually—and slightly—divergent speeds.
With new album Yume, ambient electronica musician Helios seems to recall the beauty of lazing underneath a sun-crested sky. The music soothes by letting high notes drift out to a gold horizon. It seems to lift off from the soft fringes of grass and get carried out on a hot puff of wind. More precise
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Panoramical (PC, Mac) BY FERNANDO RAMALLO & DAVID KANAGA Forget the “music visualizer” that has been spinning webs of geometry on your PC since the ’90s. Panoramical finally makes it as outda
Kill Screen is bringing games to the starving masses once again; make sure you come out to the Ace Hotel tomorrow night for the August edition of Playlist, our free public arcade. Local independent music label GODMODE will be DJing once again, and the bar will be stocked. This month, you can practic
The annual “song of the summer” competition is bullshit. Like summer movie season, which has taken over much of the calendar year over the course of Marvel’s latest phase, the song of the summer is a temporally inaccurate designation. But even if the song of the summer only made its presence felt du
Stage Presence is karaoke with less musicality and more social anxiety, and really, what’s not to like about that? You play as the frontman of a band. You’re on stage at a large festival—think Glastonbury, but without the ambient fug—when something goes wrong. Who knows what went wrong. This is the
“Why are you treading on the grass, you dummy?” I had that thought at least a dozen times while playing Sanctuary, Connor Sherlock’s synth-y, first-person walking simulator. There are dirt paths to walk on but much of the ground is covered by grass. Sometimes the shortest path to wherever you’re go
