‘Did she know how right she was?’ asks the guy who uploaded Kate Bush’s Deeper Understanding – a stately 1989 tearjerker about a woman whose deepest attachment is to her computer – to Youtube. But surely even the clairvoyant KB couldn’t have predicted some aspects of our modern technoculture – who, for example, would’ve guessed producers would still be sampling the soundtrack to Street Fighter II (1992) years into the 21st Century?
In the podcast I talk to James Svensson about what it’s like being paid to play (and, to be fair, make) videogames. It’s a fascinating insight into an industry that now outgrosses Hollywood. We also discuss sinister web-era marketing tactics, the innate superiority of pre-digital SFX, ‘gameification’ and the ‘Tetris effect’ – which is apparently a real, cognitive thing. I can tell you that this is the video Jim mentions. I can’t, however, tell you what the children whose wailing punctuates our chat were up to, or whether they’re ok.
This issue’s playlist is, as you may have intuited by now, all about our relationship with technology – and how that technology shapes our relationships with people. Lots of instances, as such, of human voices warped and transfigured by machines: Steves Reich and Hauschildt loop some vox, the buzzing of an overtaxed mic heightens the poignancy of the Velvets’ Femme Fatale and both Timbaland and the Black Ghosts get overwrought about the vicissitudes of the iPhone-era dating game. We wrap things up with some Tangerine Dream, so that, a la Stelarc, you can sit back, hold your laptop close and dream about the ‘technological extension of human intelligence’ beyond corporeo-terrestrial bounds.
