LISTENING

Sharing here a few wobbly bits I have been listening to and enjoying. glob, by glob deejay, is a warm, shimmery thing, somewhat fluid in genre but moving around the zones of what would perhaps be described as minimal house and ambient techno. It is gentle and lighthearted, not so serious and pleasantly so. For me, it clicked right away. Appleblim is Laurie Osborne, who founded the Skull Disco label with Shackleton many years ago in Bristol, and has made a great deal of music that I have not listened to. His album Liminal Tides is a dubby, soundscapey, somewhat shapeless thing that builds and warbles in waves. It is very relaxing and expansive, and great to walk around in a floaty state to. It sounds like a metal ocean. II is the second album by an artist who goes by the moniker of Paperclip Minimiser. It is made from “bio-electronic rhythms” and “bitcrushed modem whines” that were first recorded in 2011, sat on, then reworked into the album, and as such, it sounds a bit like a recontextualised remake of a post-dubsteppy bass music sound from around about that time. Future past, past as future. It’s nothing particularly novel, but just really well done. Instant click. Neurons activated. (And this little EP thing, also great.) Blumenfantasie, by Xylitol, is a high tempo, breakbeaty thing that is quite rushy and exciting, but also has various mellow background layers to it. Enticing album art, and enjoyable to listen to. It works well. The best thing I have heard all year though is Lateral, by Mammo. It is a 3xLP album, made up of 100 minutes of lovely ambient-ish dub techno wobbles organised into something like suites. Nearly every track is eight minutes or longer, giving each one time to rise slowly, building through expansive repetition and loopy layers of feedback. It is a journey, and I like this from the notes: “Disc one sparkles with vitality and a buoyancy. The middle disc has more drive and harder bites that you may want to amplify and split out to slot in a DJ bag. Sides five and six move into deeper, dreamier and more emotional techno in twilight. Each one is a little distinct and has its own orbit.”

PLAYING

I played two of the more acclaimed new “indie” games this year. Both were good but yet I have somewhat mixed feelings about each. The first was Cairn, a realistic, and therefore quite difficult, climbing game. In video games, climbing a mountain is always a metaphor for the overcoming of some kind of internal struggle, and that is true here too, albeit with a treatment that is a bit more nuanced than is typical. You play Aava, a champion climber, who is attempting to climb Kami, an enormous, multi-staged mountain that no one has ever totally scaled. The story is that, in escaping into climbing, Aava is retreating from some personal battles of her own, but this more background than foreground. It’s a plot, and a motivation, that is well handled, and that develops slowly, coming into play during key moments of the tumultuous climb through cutscenes that build the character’s backstory out. The focus is on the experience of the mountain terrain and surrounding vistas, and the climbing mechanics that see you scale the rock, moving one limb at a time. And from what I gather, it is an extraordinary well designed system, which bears a genuine likeness to the actual experience of mountain climbing. With the analog stick you place a foot in a crook or crevice, then an arm, then another foot, and then an arm again, and if all well placed, Aava moves upwards painstakingly. If misplaced or overstretched, she stumbles or falls, and you have to start again. In this respect, Cairn is much like Baby Steps, one of my favourite games of recent times, and therefore should have clicked for me, but, for whatever reason, I never gelled with the mechanics in quite the same way as I did with that similarly punishingly difficult game, As such, I never felt the highs and lows that come from the accomplishment that is meeting the game’s challenges and overcoming them through focus and persistence, through sweating and swearing and pushing ever further on. Instead, with Cairn, I always felt like I wasn’t quite getting it and wasn’t going to, so I dropped the difficulty down and turned on some of the assistance tweaks, allowing me to learn as I went and progress on my own terms. With this, I was able to complete the game, not without difficulty, but not with the true strain and struggle around which the game is designed. And, as such, I feel I can’t relate exactly to the emphatic experiences some people describe when playing the game, wherein they finished a gruelling section, and, after near-desperation, experienced a kind of ecstatic elation and relief.

The other game was Esoteric Ebb, a single player CRPG set in a fantasy world that follows a malleable player-character who arrives to a small settlement wherein a mystery has unfolded, that they have been tasked to resolve. In the simplest summation, you are The Cleric. Someone has burnt down the town’s tea shop, and you need to find out what for and why. It is inspired by tabletop games like Dungeon and Dragons more generally, but specifically informed by Disco Elysium, an influence that is well foregrounded rather than denied. This is, a “Disco-like,” to use the game designer’s own descriptor of what he, over many fastidious years, has made. I loved Disco Elysium, so I was interested to play something like it, and by all measures Esoteric Ebb lives up to the comparison, being a funny, extremely well written, very engaging RPG that uses the same set of systems and has a notably similar style and premise to Disco Elysium. This strength was also the problem I had with it. Esoteric Ebb has great art, characters, writing, and systems, and develops a compelling narrative that you want to follow to its end. But it is so, so close to Disco Elysium that it feels a little off-putting at points, like a retreading of the same ground that does everything really well but never quite on the level of the source material it draws unashamedly from. I wanted it to break further away and expand, but it doesn’t. And so, as much as I enjoyed it and would rather play something intelligent and obsessively crafted like this than a majority of everything else out there in the world of games, I finished it feeling like it doesn't quite stand alone from that which it is lovingly homaging. In turn, I wonder what Zero Parade: For Dead Spies, a new game made by some of the developers of Disco Elysium will be like, given all that happened with that studio. It is out next month.

PERSONAL

I have the aim of shooting ten rolls of film this year. So far, I’ve done three, two wintry ones in black-and-white, and now that the sun is finally starting to get his hat on, one in colour. It seems I won’t reach my goal of ten, but goals for me are always more a motivation to do something, anything, than a specific metric that I need to meet. I never mourn failing them too much, as long as some effort was made. Below, a few pictures from the last roll, which together tell a story of the last month or so. I am getting worse at photography with every picture taken, but with this liking the shots more and more.