Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360) Eurogamer

This review just went up at Eurogamer, and though this really ain’t my genre of game (at least ’til now), this sounds like something I’ll have to find the ah, demo of once it’s out on beigebox.

From a certain kind of perspective that is an aspect of the witness, movement as it is normally perceived doesn’t exist. Everything is where it can be, nowhere is there a tension which could force a thing to move. The usual perception of time alters as well, of course.

Still, it doesn’t feel right to say that motion doesn’t exist in that view, it’s more like distance doesn’t exist. Because the field that this view oversees is unbounded, distance and separation don’t make sense anymore, and therefore it’s not possible to move from A to B in C amount of time. It seems like movement is usually ordered hierarchically (I want to get there, it would be better to be there than here). From the witness perspective, there is no there and here, because everything is where it is; and there’s no order: the world is one flat field, one experience, without boundaries but with a kind of coincidental, horizontal organization (the word Gliederung would be better), but that’s a thoroughly non-hierarchical kind of organization.

At first, the aspect of this perspective where the body becomes reduced to a collection of experiences (that to the usual mind feels threateningly immobile) seems unhealthily dissociative, but in practice the loose relaxation and the deeply simple feeling of having the space to let the body have a pleasant experience of movement feels quite nice and natural.

The state of the techno.

Panno, a mix by Gorje Hewek (from last Sunday): check the symphony orchestra accompanying the torch song singer; the bossa nova piano and attendant stompy groovy combo, from 11:23; the soulful Rhodes trickling around the close harmony crooning from 15:00; and again later on hurrying along below the cinematic strings. And yes it’s still techno, as far as I can tell, not that I care, because this is too likable a sound to worry about that. You’ll have to hear the rest for yourself, but check that you downloaded the whole thing (83 Mb) because it seems the deepmix crew is doing some server related eh, maintenance.

Comparison

The Star Shrink Shooters – Tanz-Demokratur: Extrawelt’s slutty big sister, the one with the swagger in her electro-booty.

What I heard today.

AMD -  Bigfish
Everybody luuurves a 303, e.g. AMD and I. Very clean compositions, very clear palette of old skool acid sounds, varied and layered with care, with a minimum of hegemonising melody and no arpeggio to be found, and even some major key chords. Not adventurous at all, but really mindful and convincing. But while listening I wondered “can psytrance be safe, and still be psytrance?” – well of course it can, safety isn’t so much the issue as superficiality. At least this is authentic. Maybe safe, but not shallow.

Troll scientists – Useless Science
Seems like the second part gets better than the safe (and regrettably shallow) first half, more fun and more energetic, to say the least.

Ott – Skylon
I’m really more bothered than I anticipated by the feeling that dub as a style has really been appropriated by a bunch of trippy white dudes, that making dub today is an anachronism and a slightly silly pastime, that it’s like a historical reenactment, that the original dub style was in a way musically quite narrow in its expression, and that it seems pointless to try to force non-dubwise musical ideas into a dub sound, but that the compositorial ‘vision’ of the inventors of dub is far from exhaustedly explored, and that it makes more sense today to do this in dubstep, dubtechno and the true ambient (which is not chill), as opposed to trying to keep the dubzombie shambling on by repeating the exact same sounds (however delicately produced).

Oxycanta winter blooms
Gooood. The true ambient, with some cheesy intrusions from the chill side and some annoying ones from glitchy parts, but a lot of space, a lot of beatlessness, and a nice vibe of bubbles contentedly floating along, taking all the time they need to pop.

Tipper – Relish the Trough
Tipper is the kind of overwhelmingly masterful producer whose music is too good to listen to – it’s like the ongoing realization of just how good it is, overwhelms the power of the music to convey its own musicality; so partly it makes me impatient with myself: ’stop slobbering and just listen and enjoy’, but on the other hand a sort of jadedness sets in: ‘yeah, it doesn’t really matter what he’s trying to sing anyway, ’cause it’s gonna sound awesome anyway, so why bother’.

Chunks o’ text

Firstly, via BoingBoing, this story: Mallory, by Leonard Richardson. It’s a lot of fun, if you like electrical phenomena like the internet, or computers, or the games played therewith. The density of implied backstory is great as the deftness with which it is hinted at, but the humour does lean a bit too heavily on reference. Still, wit!

When looking up reference to a literary technique made by one of the commenters I was reminded of Raymond Smullyan, whose dialogue “Is God a Taoist?” I then found published here. Must have read that first maybe 10 years ago already, really the one thing that stuck in my mind most of his collection “The Tao is Silent” I found in the local library. Some of the concepts in that book and specifically in this piece I still hold to be perfect enough approximations of pragmatic maxims that I can use them pretty much literally, as if they were dogma. (Also funny, this, by the way.)

Not straight ahead at all.

Not straight ahead at all, but rather, as I was listening to it, quite queer (but still very much ahead) is Haltya’ recent CD Book of Nature.

Rainbow Funkster: George Clinton as he shakes with the chills in his fever dream, imagining himself as a technoviking. There’s even a track called Mothership.

Sub Signals vol. 1 is as if a mob of gently grizzled kings amble towards you, carrying kerchiefs and towels filled and glowing with soft gold. It’s like these producers sifted and polished and reheated and sublimated and cured these purest nuggets of dub, also as a gesture of affection towards Gaudi.