For today, I wrote a personal triptych piece about the 2021 album Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra.

I’m glad Pharoah felt a kinship with Sam too, and granted us the gift that is Promises. The same four chords guide us through almost the entirety of its nine movements, and I remember being really confused on my first listen. I was expecting some transition, some new chord shapes or forms, another key, another distinct melody at the base of the forty-six-minute record, and was confused when the record faded to white unflinching in its dedication to those four chords or some small variation of them in the last two movements, leaving me in a stunned silence on my drive. As I am wont to do, despite my confusion, I chewed on Promises some more, knowing there was something there for me. 

You can read the rest here.

This is coming up! First practices begin soon! See you there!

I also may be doing a solo show in Buffalo this summer? Maybe? Keep you posted.

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Misc. Stuff I’m Into:

Movies:

• Taxi Driver [1976, dir. Martin Scorsese]. A horror movie.

• Mikey and Nicky [1976, dir. Elaine May]. Portrait of the years eroding a friendship.

• Mad Max: Fury Road [2015, dir. George Miller]. I get it now.

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die [2026, dir. Gore Verbinski]. Doesn’t completely stick the landing, but a wonderful and infuriating romp that I highly recommend you see in a theater.

I recently got a Letterboxd Patron-tier subscription which means I can have little unique movie posters and banners now. It’s fun. Movies are back, baby.

Music:

is also back, baby:

• Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises (cried)

• U.e. - Other Girl

• Mitski - Nothing’s About To Happen To Me (cried)

• Buck Meek - The Mirror

• Bruno Mars - The Romantic. Even when he’s mid he’s still good.

• Gorillaz - The Mountain. Monumental.

• Fugazi - Albini Sessions (Benefit for Letters Charity). It’s a benefit for the charity in the title! Also the first track is called Cassavettes, and Mikey and Nicky stars John Cassavettes, love these little coincidences.

Books:

are back to boot, baby:

• Alfred Lansing - Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. Gifted and highly recommended by Erin. Read the first chapter and it described a boat being destroyed by ice like a massive beast being slain. I’m so in.

• Keza MacDonald - Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company that Unlocked the Power of Play. Almost put the book down when I read the ‘top 50 Nintendo Games’ list in the back and it didn’t include Earthbound, but she had a good reason for it, so I forgave her. The book is a really well written history and so far I’m hooked.

• I finished How Do You Live? and am excited to rewatch The Boy and the Heron with that under my belt.

Games:

You’re on thin ice. (Just kidding you can be back too):

• UFO 50. More on this below.

• Resident Evil: Requiem. Basically doing a live Let’s Play with/for Em. The banter between us helps ease the tension of giant terrifying corpse-eating girls and screeching opera banshees. I do not scare easily, and this game has me up in a cold sweat at night. It’s my first Resident Evil game which I have already been adequately yelled at about, thanks.

• Balatro. I’m back in. LocalThunk has hooked me yet again, sucker that I am for a punishing roguelite.

It’s March 10th, Mario day, and lately I’ve been listening for a little lightness. The smell of spring has begun rolling through my window along with a neighbor blasting reggae, I am looking up at a blue sky instead of down onto a street caked in sludgy slush, and the mourning doves on my fire escape are cooing like it’s going out of style.

In the moments of intense rain, fog, or general gloom over the past few weeks, I’ve had to look elsewhere to catch little glimpses of optimism, and have found it in Mossmouth’s 2024 video game UFO 50. It became available on Nintendo Switch last year, but something told me that I really wanted to own it, to hold it in my hand, so I ordered the deluxe edition from Fangamer and waited around until it arrived two weeks ago. It had been delayed by yet another blast of winter storms, the dying gasp of a particularly rough season that has refused to let us live.

I am so glad I waited. The deluxe edition comes with a companion guide laying out tips, tricks, art, and comics about the 50 games in the library of the fictional game company UFO Soft for the equally fictional LX line of consoles. Plus, there are gold cartridge and cherry cartridge stickers to place over the cartridges laid out in the front of the guide for when you complete each game. And a ton MORE stickers of the little pig-alien mascot. It feels like holding the guide to the original 151 Pokémon that I poked through at a Scholastic Book Fair in elementary school, or the Prima strategy guide that held my young hand through The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Part of the joy and ease of UFO 50’s games despite the punishing, NES-inspired nature of the controls and environments comes from the fact that if I play something for a few minutes, one round, or one run, and don’t care for it, I can shuffle on over to the next game in the chronology to try and find something for me. And there has been! Despite instantly bouncing off the first two games Barbuta and Bug Hunter, I found my stride in the top-down Splatoon-like Paint Chase and nail-biting quick-climbing roguelike Velgress. I’ve dumped hours and hours into the deckbuilder Party House (earning the aforementioned cherry-cartridge), and took my spatial reasoning to the limit with the puzzle game Devilition. I sweated through my shirt playing the samurai soccer game Bushido Ball, and vowed to see the puzzle-platformer Warptank all the way through to its end. I thought of my experiences with VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, and Spelunky (the latter by the same developer), all games that are so deeply unforgiving yet so deeply rewarding, whether I was playing with friends, passing a controller back and forth, or having my thumbs go numb trying to make it out alive. For all my talk of wanting ease, it feels ironic to find it in the form of fifty punishing NES-style adventures, and the fictional development history that encircles them.

Despite there being quite literally fifty fully fleshed-out games in this thing, my favorite part has been reading the little developer blurbs provided with every one. We learn that fictional lead designer Thorson Petter worked on his creative passion project and UFO Soft debut Barbuta on the clock, which I wouldn’t know anything about. You can read about the Bushido Ball promo tournament held at a bar local to the company, or that Warptank came from a dream, or that the Earthbound-like models in Party House were based on fictional friends and family of the equally fictional dev team. There are even easter eggs and worlds shared between games in the collection, and several sequels! I feel the decade of development poured into this work, not only in the fifty games (I am 31 games in, and most of them are quite good), but in the entire universe that was crafted around this cracked console. They even have a fictionalized ‘cracktro’ of the real-life lead dev Derek Yu finding the LX console in a storage unit. It reminds me, of course, of the Mother 3 fan translation screen, the first thing I saw turning on what would become my favorite game of all time for the first time.

So, yeah. I’ve found a little bit of that ease I was looking for, in the returning warmth of springtime and the joy of making my way through UFO 50. Just like the hilarious difficulty of some of these games, I remembered the cosmic irony of the fact that finding ease isn’t always easy, but always worthwhile.

- Will