What is happening

After a flurry of posting, my attention to this site has been distracted by several projects which involve the mysterious locii of my brain involved with the production of sentences. I'll let you know as soon as these become viable.

I promise you an interview with Ableton very soon, once I have been through a process of getting them to deal with some technical problems I've been having with Live 5. Their response, when it arrived, has been reasonably intensive, and we're trying to get to the bottom of just why my laptop likes to render loud clicking sounds over every track it creates. Some suggest problems with RAM, some rumble about mysterious "local problems" (perhaps the climate in Oxfordshire is unfavourable), but someone will be able to fix it.

In other news, Determinance (the game) is being toured covertly around parts of California by its creator before we unveil at the IGC. He has plans to swagger into an internet cafe and drop it on unsuspecting LAN gamers, which would be a sight to behold. He is currently "talking to people" as we speak. I can only hope that firstly, that's as exciting as it sounds, and secondly I'll be able to tell you about it soon.

I saw one of the guys from Lab4 at the gym today, but he was lifting huge weights so I didn't really feel like wandering over and going, "So, I hear you make hardcore techno." If you go to their site the music that it plays will drive you insane after about 20 seconds - there's something about dance music at a low bitrate that sets my teeth on edge.

I love this Shining thing. Note: having seen the film is a prerequisite for finding it funny.

I will return.

Determinance on Joystiq

Nice little comment on Joystiq about Determinance - great to feature in one of the only blogs about gaming that's actually readable.

"Big" Piano

Nintendo finally unveils Revolution controller.

Someone has to buy me this as charity, and also because nobody else will use it to trigger the Amen break.

Determinance, Elijah Wood, Beekveld and so forth

Yes, I have finished working on Determinance (for now at least). Let's all have a party. I have a new Devblog to celebrate.

As I mentioned on GarageGames, I'm loving Binster's new reinterpretation of his old song. I know it's somewhat irritating that I continually praise everything musical he does (he is my friend), but it's difficult not to when his stuff is just so entertaining and tuneful. So there.

The rain today is utterly unwarranted, as I was actually going to go outside. Ho hum.

Music4Games have a...well, I'm going to say, it's a slightly silly trailer for Videogames Live. The concerts look cool, however, and I for one want to see a symphony orchestra accompanying a game of Frogger:

[boing...boing...blip]

One highlight for me is Elijah Wood telling us how videogames are no longer for geeks but are now "woven into the intricate fabric of our culture" (or something like that).

[no gag required]

Yeah, that's right Elijah, you tell it like it is:

And finally, Erwin Beekveld's site has undergone an overhaul. You can see more photography and things. Yes.

Terrifyingly-Pixellated Jackie Chan Music Videos: A Primer (Part One)

Not....waaaant!

You know it’s a slow news day when the only thing to write about is Jackie Chan; especially Jackie Chan singing. Now, I wasn’t aware of this until today, but unfortunately, the uniquely irritating star of the sparkling cinematic apotheoses that are Shanghai Knights and Shanghai Noon as well as countless actual kung-fu movies containing slightly less of Owen Wilson’s crass, monophonically “charming,” lop-sided brand of transparently self-aggrandising, down-home, put-the-chicken-out-back-again-Johnny-darn-bird’s-stolen-Ma’s-teeth “comedy,” is a singer. And if that horribly distended sentence wasn’t enough to prevent you from probing further, then I literally dare you to follow in the intrepid, if foolhardy, footsteps of Cinematical to JackieChanMusic.com where you can check out the Chan-man’s output in despairingly blocky WMV form.

Just so you don’t have to go it entirely alone, here’s the first part of my navigational chart of the Chanosphere:

With All One’s Heart (2002)

1.) Truly, With All My Heart

It’s probably a good thing that this masterpiece is placed at the atrium of this Palace of Chan. A relatively (that’s an important word) painless power-ish ballad, all emphatic cadence and lingering reverb-tails, its apparent refrain (“Chunder, chunder...”) will live long in the memory, as will Chan’s hair-tossing sheepdog moments at 0:42 and 2:30. Also, has anyone seen Dark Water?

Mommy! [gurgle..........huge horror chord]

Truly, With All My Heart receives three Chans out of five:

4.) I Only Care About You (#2-3 mercifully corrupted)

Frankly, this could be a picture of anything, but I'm going with the caption,"Snow White-zon consume POWER APPLE-a! AHHHHH!!![grows]"

One of the Chanmeister’s many evocative duets; this one features a woman who is apparently oblivious to a huge crowd of sailors drowning behind her. Chan’s lascivious, vacant leer is intercut with shots of vampire-children rushing lethally for the soft necks of innocent passers-by.

I Only Care About You is the sorry recipient of meagre, solo Chan:

6.) Dream of the Horizon (#5 corrupted – thanks Powers that Be)

"To swim in the shallow end, you must answer my riddle."

Despite having a title that sounds like a Vangelis b-side, this Chantasm contains not only the DJ Quicksilver “record-stop” sample (0:37), but also something approximating robot dancing by Sir Chan-a-lot, if the robot in question was a dying jellyfish robot trained to viciously deflate into a confused gelatinous puddle at the slightest hint of peril:

"Look, it's a brontosaurus! A brontosaurus in the painting! Now impressionism has FAILED! Ha ha ha...HA HA HA! [scream]"

Four Chans out of five for Dream of the Horizon:

Accidental Spy (OST) (2001)

I have no idea what “OST” denotes; Obviating Sensory Tenacity, perhaps?

1) Out of Control

Back from the cheerful pop-realm of Dream of the Horizon, the hapless viewer is plunged headlong into another power-ballad duet; this time featuring Chan and his cohort trapped in a late 60’s sci-fi series where people call each other things like “Unit Seven” and fly around grey concourses by catching thermal updrafts with their hairstyles.

“Zendor’s frog army will surely outflank the Xenians!” [pause] “Tell me of your homeworld, Usul.” [enormous neutron explosion]

There’s a subplot about a man who jumps off a roof carrying a bag and then drives a van in this video, but I absolutely cannot bring myself to care about him. At one point, he pivots dangerously like meat on a hook:

I promise I haven't done anything to this screengrab. I know it looks horrifying, but...I just...no he's not made up like a minstrel either.

Three Chans for Out of Control:

2000 (unknown)

Here, the classification system becomes somewhat arcane, but we soldier on regardless.

HK-All-Stars: Dung Fang Mei Lik

No, I don’t know what that means either. Anyway, we’re treated initially to shimmering synths and an expansive cityscape, but we know by now to brace our necks firmly for the appearance of Lord Chan of Chantia, which occurs around 0.25, where he grimaces and suddenly spanks a music stand for no reason:

...[swish]..."You ok?"...[swish]..."...yeah."

At least, I think it’s him, but frankly I have no idea.
Everything about this video is distinctly unsettling:

“We have come for your Betamax. Zzzzzzzzzzzzaaaar!”

Anyway, there’s some spasmodic movement, a big crowd of women in weird white jumpsuits and…

"The Sunglasses."

Actually, there’s so many people in this video that it’s started to dawn on me that it may be some kind of Hong Kong version of Band Aid:

The Potato Lords command that you immediately feed the world with their tuberous carbohydrates!

We’re also treated to some English lyrics, reminding us that however idiotic Jackie Chan may look, he can still speak two languages and you can’t. Unless you can, in which case, he…loses.

I want to give this only three out of five Chans because there’s not enough Chan it it for it to be true Chan, however the silliness permits it to ascend to the glorious stratum of FOUR CHANS:

A Man Should Be of Self Help

[Some gag about the World's Largest Toffee-Apple.]

An intriguing title for a totally dull video in which Commander Chan runs around some children who all fall over at the great wall of China while waving an umbrella. Inexcusable.

No chans.

HK-All-Stars: Dung Fang Mei Lik

Yes, they’re back, just when we least wanted:

“You know what would look really good…”

How come, during the mighty guitar solo, we only get to see this guy?

“Begorrah, sensei, is there a pot-of-gold at the end of me chi? What’s that? Unite all racial stereotype in one body? Surely no man can undergo such challenge?” [lips continue moving, cut to shot of a guy jumping out of a barrel and then cut to a shot of a biscuit doing folk dancing]

One Chan for this particular disaster.

That’s it for this first instalment of “Terrfyingly-Pixellated Jackie Chan Music Videos.” Thanks for reading - be sure to check back soon for more of the same peculiar genus of sheer exhilaration.

Everything is funny if you loop it enough

Nervous Testpilot Meets Erwin Beekveld

Erwin Beekveld vs. The Chair of Comedy

“What’s this? A link to what is transparently going to be stupid video in my inbox from someone whose taste I don’t quite trust? Well, that totally makes up for my completely pitiful salary.” Quickly scanning the filename for any vague assurance that it’s not NumaNuma, or anything from Saturday Night Live in the last five years, you click with hesitant trepidation upon the tiny icon…

Erwin Beekveld is the man behind something you might have received under the auspicious banner “LOL ROFFLE” in the last few weeks. No, it’s not this…

...it’s They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, a gloriously pointless “video remix” comprised of looped sections of dialogue from Lord of the Rings set to a horrifying early-90’s euro-techno interpretation of the theme music on which somebody has expended far too much effort. I blogged about it last week, if you weren’t paying attention.

Now, unless you’re the aforementioned Gary Brolsma, or the Star Wars Kid, and actually end up becoming the unfortunate star of your own meme, nobody ever bothers to take the time to find out exactly why you were spending your time posting rubbish on the internet and not working on the land. In order to expose the devilish internal mechanics of the fractured European psyche, I spoke to Mr. Beekveld to find out what he had to say for himself.

Erwin winds his clockwork tooth to create safe, renewable energy.

Erwin is a 36-year-old Dutch guy for whom the land has little attraction. Laid off from ten years of employment as a programmer and systems-administrator for a large Dutch music-retail chain, he “lost faith” in steady employment and now works freelance.

When he’s not paying the bills, Erwin’s either remixing C64 tunes like Cauldron II, Game Over, Parallax and Spellbound under the name of Tron, collaborating with the remixing duo Subversive Elements, an interest which was sparked “so long ago that most of your readers were probably still in liquid form,” or sampling his mates’ answer-phone messages to use in "Hobbits"-style pop-dance atrocities.

None of this is particularly evident from his inscrutable site http://www.beekveld.com/, a testing ground for various web-programming projects which happens to house some of Erwin’s unusual and very accomplished photography. “Every month I would put up some new pictures that I've taken during everyday activities, for my friends to see,” he told me. “But recently, I decided to restyle my website, and as a test I put a random handful of my pictures on it. I don't even recall which ones I put up there!” Photography is more than a hobby, though: “I took my first photo when I was about eight years old and I've been snapping ever since. I am a serious photographer but it is not really my profession. Friends call me stupid for that.”

"The orcs hath taken our conditioner! Now Middle Earth is dangerously frizzy!"

So, what about those hobbits? With the video being played at on a huge screen at the Fellowship Festival in London, and even a possible release for the music (yes, really), I asked Erwin how he felt about the success of his strange little brainchild.

“I neither expected nor intended it to become so insanely popular. I'm getting tons of fan mail from all over the world. Some wrote me that it totally made their day - I find it very rewarding to hear that my "creation" made people laugh, smile or beefed up their rainy day. Those are the best!” he enthuses.

He describes the piece as “bad holiday-camp entertainment” and told me that it came about as a result of the rampant emotional trauma that repeated viewings of Peter Jackson’s orc-tastic festival of posturing is bound to induce. Certain moments of Stanislavskian brilliance are bound to be salient: “On top of the list was Orlando Bloom's ‘serious face’ during, ‘They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!’ You can imagine this sentence, including the serious face, can be called upon repeatedly during normal conversations. A friend of mine, Martine, raised it to another level by saying it every odd minute, and I noticed it had a 3/4 beat. Another friend of mine, Jackles, finally persuaded me to make a tune of it.” The same friend was responsible for posting the resulting “product,” (created in Propellerheads’ Reason) complete with video mashup, to a LOTR fan forum. Everyone knows the rest.

Cool Edit Pro makes me want to wear a red straightjacket as well.

“Does anyone know if Orlando Bloom’s seen the video yet?” asks Beekveld, but I have to confess to languishing in ignorance. If I were Orlando Bloom, I’d use it as my showreel. But that’s probably why I’m not Orlando Bloom.

Fuelled by an eclectic musical taste that runs from the instrumental electronic flouncery of Jean-Michelle Jarre, through Mozart, and ends up lodged behind the artistic dustbin that is the oeuvre of Alanis Morrissette, Beekveld’s future projects include, “a tune with the working title ‘The Egyptian Ignition Problem.’ It is a musical work of 8 minutes describing powerlessness, despair and inner acceptance. In genre best compared to Ravel's Bolero. It will be on the CD I'm working on with Jackles under the name of Confessant.” He sees this work as his greatest achievement, and hopes that he’ll be remembered as more than just the hobbit guy.

He’s not too afraid of the little furry-footed pests, though. Extended and instrumental versions of “Hobbits” are apparently also in the works, and copyright permitting, the single will be out relatively soon. “And if, of course, another blockbuster movie comes along with an occasional silly line and a catchy theme suitable for a techno remix, I'm sure I'll make another one.”

Don't you be comin' all up in Marks and Spensers talking no smack.

Asked if he had any further use for the glistering interface with the masses that is nervoustestpilot.co.uk, Beekveld demanded that the public purchase the Confessant album twice (check his website regularly for release information) and contributed his motto, “There are no problems, only solutions.” I paused for a few seconds, my lip trembling, then screamed, “They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!” into his face with all my might, running off to be enveloped by the night’s thankless shroud.

Coming next time...

I'm working on Determinance right at this moment, so there will be a slight hiatus until a few days time. Despite this mild inconvenience there are some exciting things in the works involving Doom, some hobbits and Ableton. How enigmatic of me.

Doom Remix

While we're on a VGMix-type "tip", I thought I'd point out The Dark Side of Phobos, OCR's Doom Remix project. Robert Prince and John Romero's brittle rock tracks from the original game get stomped all over by a veritable legion of OverClocked guys. The Best Remixer Name Ever Award has to go to the wonderfully monikered "ArseAssasin", who apparently, "first grew interested in electronic music by listening to Village People."

Game remix stuff usually churns up an amazing bevy of insane programming, total rhythmic and melodic dyslexia, and sounds that no human mind is capable of processing. No exceptions here, then. It's a bananas mix of actual rock and metal (with guitars and everything - check out Evil Horde's bonkers cutup "Hangarmageddon", which sounds like [simile]Gary Moore's disembodied head being used as a football by demons whilst Amigas fall on them from metal shelves[/simile]), dark ambience and general software-synth grinding.

I've always been a fan of the remixing scene because it gives people a way into production that they wouldn't otherwise have, and also helps to canonise and reintroduce some classic game tunes. Larger-scale projects like this help to galvanise the scene and generate external publicity, and that can only be a good thing.

Hiii, Batman. You want some ICE CREAM?

It's well known that I will take literally any excuse for an I AM BATMAN reference, and today is no exception. Here's Binster's (currently WIP) remix of the theme from an Amiga game called "Batman the Movie" which features an intriguing sample of Jack Nicholson shouting, "This town needs an enema." This is possibly something you should treasure.

You'll need a VGMix account to comment on it, but even though they apparently verify membership by hand mine was done in a matter of minutes.

Some pun about Grannies and videogames

This article at Gamasutra illustrates what happens if you get a load of games designers together in a room and ask them a stupid question. The stupid question in question is "what kind of game would you design for a grandmother to play?" Here's an idea from the guy who designed Katamari Damacy (I should add at this point that he intends his game to be played with a controller shaped like a cat which emits "heat-waves"):

"The game would begin with the family suggesting to Granny that she wear the cat because, for example, her knees looked cold. Embedded in the cat is the capability for it to communicate wirelessly with other cat controllers (on other Grannies' knees) in the neighborhood. When the cat connects to another one, "..the onboard a.i. kicks in." This causes the cat to speak, paraphrased as "meow, meow, grandma, meow". Takahashi explains that the family are required to participate in the game by pretending that they haven't heard anything, because of this – Grandma begins to build the perception that she is able to communicate directly with the cat. As the dialogue with the cat develops, it suggests that Granny make some soup – but faster than the other granny down the street who has also received the instruction. A competitive element emerges and gradually the cat suggests more and more group activities that Grandma might engage in, culminating in trips to the park. "..So they all go outside and eventually they meet other old ladies with cats and they all become friends."

I feel like I should add something here, but I can't bring myself to do it.

Stupid song time (oh good)!

But this time it's not my fault. It's Beekveld's. He did this, which is best described as the Mr Blobby song meets OSYMYSO.

Rebirth is dead...

Long live Rebirth! Propellorhead Software's emulation of the TB-303, TR-808 and TR-909 was a fairly desirable piece of kit when I was growing up in the Bronx thirty years ago, and they've just discontinued it to concentrate on making Reason better.

In the "spirit of sharing", they've made the program available as a free download. Seriously, go and get it. It's a bit clunky by today's standards, but it's fun.

Sigh....ACEEEEED! There, I said it.

UPDATE - 100 Internet points for me as I scoop MusicThing.