“Whoa. Look at this place!” Ellie says as you walk through the doorway, into an old record store. You’re on your way to Bill’s hideout and this abandoned town is the first place that lets you truly grasp Ellie’s alienation from our own world. It’s not that she just doesn’t listen to records. She’s n
Everyone shuffles in, somehow looking both non-committal and excited. The space is tight-knight, vaguely dingy, and hot from all the breaths and bodies. People are talking, but not real talk—at most, small talk, to diffuse the tension of waiting. Then, the lights go black and everything stops for on
With his latest EP, Paths We Take, internet weird-house and software artist Brian returns us to his distinctive realm of ordinary life turned bizarre. It’s an EP of four songs, each one describing a chapter in a story that follows two people and their life together as it unfolds. “They meet, fall in
Welcome to life after Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, where every music game feels incomplete without J.K. Simmons’ Fletcher yelling, “are you rushing or are you dragging?” While Whiplash does not yet exist in game form, at least there’s Clapping Music, which may induce similar levels of angst in player
The world is an infinite musical instrument. This is the prevailing idea across the interactive documentary Soundhunters. And it doesn’t mean in the way as I understood it in my college days, drumming out beats onto desk corners with my fingers; it’s less deliberate than that. The idea is to listen
How many videogames could just as easily be Bon Iver or Sigur Rós music videos? Ten percent? Fifteen? In the spirit of that question, here is the trailer for Soft Body, which, in addition to being the fashion thinkpiece term of art for yours truly, is apparently “an action-puzzle game set in a medit
If you ever wanted to see Gorillaz and Blur frontman Damon Albarn dressed up as a giant ice cream cone, now’s your chance. Britpop group Blur have re-envisioned Super Mario World in their music video for “Ong Ong,” replacing Mario and Peach with Mr. and Ms. Okay, two smiling yellow circles. The vide
Sometime in the 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce created “View from the Window at Le Gras,” an image from his countryside estate that would later become the world’s oldest surviving photograph. Nearly two centuries later, people snap, discard, and forget about pictures more precise and vibrant than anything
Feeling starved for layered electronic beats and primary-colored shapes? Well, you’re in luck. In Colour, the debut album by Jamie xx, is here to fill that rectangle-shaped void in your heart. Like the music of his other project, The xx, Jamie’s solo work is low-key and beautifully simple, but In Co
Patrick McDermott says that ambient and noise is the most interactive music he has ever felt, both as a listener and composer. What he especially enjoys about this type of arcane composition is that it lets you dream up whatever visuals you want as you listen. “The sonic world it creates, the mood i
When you think of tabletop gaming what do you hear? It’s probably stone-cold silence as players shoot glances at each other, peering between decks and figurines, trying to weigh up one another. Or a monotone voice reciting the rules for the 34th time in order to explain why you can’t make that move
Electropop’s master illusionist to spin at Two5six Drink, play, and dance at Kill Screen’s free Two5six arcade Matthew Dear will bear his soul at Kill Screen’s Two5six arcade The Two5six festival includes an arcade for all senses
What do aliens see when they look at One Direction? Do they see, a musical monstrosity straight out of Simon Cowell’s fever dreams, a band that can melt your heart with sincere ballads like the sublime “Gotta Be You”, or a blank cultural canvas that can be used to take over the world? use your boy
Behind my television is a snake nest of electronic cables. I put it there. These coiling black and gray wires feeding the sockets in my wall, powering the appliances deemed necessary in my life; an unkempt pile of synergized technology. Likewise, the innards of my PC that I precariously clasped and
Somewhere, between childhood and adulthood, we start to look at the world differently. Over time we forget what it’s like to experience the world as a place filled with color and music the way we did as children. It’s a transition that can only be described as a shame. “an instrument for exploring”
