[ad_1]
The musician Alex Lasater, who goes through ALEX, considers his ideal place as a carpeted basement, at one of those endless summer evenings when the moisture is suspended in the air and that the room is illuminated by a ghostly and fuzzy spectrum. blue glow of an old television.
I know it because one of the songs from his first album in 2017 Grow Vol. 1 called "I'm bored with sleeping more," and the site currently has 76,000 views on YouTube. The textures are muted and narcotic; a curly bundle of crystalline synthesizer, a python machine pitter and a dumb voice behind the veil.
The only thing that gets into the fog is a multitude of samples taken directly from the seminal Super Mario 64. Princess Peach reads her charmed invitation aloud, Mario sighs a heavy sigh of exhausted HP and some of these gold yard pieces ring in your pocket. The mushroom kingdom is a biting realm, adapted to the tastes and trends of 10 year olds. In the interpretation of A L E X, things went wrong. "Lack of sleep I miss" is not scary or sinister, but it is crooked, thoughtful and strange. A complex mixture of sadness and tenderness.
Basically, you can integrate A L E X's music into the hip-hop lo-fi scene; where children make 21st century relaxation cassettes and distribute them via live streams that have taken control of YouTube. Specifically, it belongs to a small community of artists who have found a source of inspiration in the bloopy soundscapes of the Nintendo 64. The best way to find it is to use YouTube mixes, where anonymous DJs roam SoundCloud and offer carefully prepared compilations. with Vaporwave-lite names such as "Mariowave" and "Nostalgia 64". The music itself can be funny and strange at first glance – a true aestheticism of 1998 – but its soul suggests a deep and inflamed nostalgia.
"When I play music, I try to do what I feel right now. I think for a lot of people, music is strongly based on expression, "Lasater, 22, said in an email sent from his Seoul, South Korea residence. "So when I play music [I’m thinking] "I want to do something that looks like this feeling". I guess I feel a lot of melancholy and nostalgia when I use these [Nintendo] samples, and people feel the same when they listen to them. "
A L E X does not compose exclusively with Nintendo samples. A large tapestry of Clinton era touchstones plays on Grow, including a title entitled "I have not been allowed to watch Who does it belong to? Growing up but now, I think it's pretty good. But overall, video games, and the way these games have crossed his childhood, are his best work.
"The idea of passing a child from an" enchanted world "to an adult from a" dark world "strangely reflects our nostalgic experiences." – Musician Graeme Clark
"After going through Ocarina of Time Listening to music and listening to music over and over again, I started to have feelings of reflection, "says Clark, when I asked him the question. Z E L D A W E V E & # 39;s composition process. "I added cartridge sounds at the beginning and at the end of the album and I tried to pick cinematic sequences that reflected growing up, like" leaving the forest "and" looking at it. " the memory of the young days. "I only realized later that the idea of changing a child into an" enchanted world "to an adult in a" dark world "strangely reflects our nostalgic experiences."
I should not be shocked by the way Z E L D A W A V E talk to me. I am 27 years old and have spent most of the 90s attached to an N64. I have already done the unconscious and emotional work annexing the innocence and chastity of my childhood to these old worlds of extreme Nintendo. It does not take long to realize that Clark's music is written in tribute to this heritage and that he too spent a ton of time waiting in the lost woods. However, that does not mean that it is an exclusive phenomenon for my generation. The musicians have always cited video game ideas. In the past, however, this has been manifested by low-resolution Game Boy, NES and SNES junks. "Chiptune", as we nicknamed it, fetishized the Reagan of the 80s for a group of slightly older players who left their happiest and oldest memories with Super Mario Bros 3 rather Super Mario 64. Nostalgia, like all things, is sinuous and constantly evolving. Everyone has their own founding text and it is now the turn of the millennial generation to establish the canon.
"The early generation of 3D is sort of the" new 8-bit, "says Luke Besley, a 28-year-old American from Melbourne, Australia, who produced the aforementioned" Dire Dire Docks "remix. "I'm so grateful that these aspects of my childhood recognize[d] and referenced and celebrated in an artistic sense. There are so many others like me who may have already felt ostracized to play video games in childhood, and we can now all come together to celebrate it, while there are many of us in the world. ;other [things] from this era fade into the story. "
It is strange, however, that the musical retrospection of the Nintendo 64 is touched by such profound and fundamental melancholy. Chiptune can be temperate and melancholy, but it is rarely the case. sad. Grow and Z E L D A W A V E, on the other hand, are congenitally dark. It makes me think that people of my age have adopted an almost cultic relationship with our own languor. Personally, I appreciate the art of A L E X because the way he triggers me. It does not bring back to life my biggest and most heroic nights. Instead, it forces me to deal with the speed with which these memories – these people – have become ghosts. You see it represented in the comments that punctuate the songs on YouTube. Many of them are loud and sad koans that speak of endless pain that goes beyond Koji Kondo's legacy. "I miss my childhood and I'm not afraid," reads infinitejest, on a download of the Zelda's Lullaby cover cut and screwed by A L E X. "I feel so depressed and alone nowadays."
The playful hymns of the SNES have caused the coldness of Super Mario 64.
If there is a zero point for all these calcified emotions, an author OG for these vibrations, it is probably the eccentric Swedish Yung Lean. As a teenager, he made his debut in 2013 with a hip-hop hip-hop character that blends the blurred nostalgia of the '90s with contemporary debasement. In the video of his best song, "Hurt," he explains how much he likes to be distracted from his mind by a dismal slanted cartridge beat. Two red N64 controllers hang from each side of the frame, in the same way that Rick Ross flexes the 1.5 million dollars of miniature diamonds around the neck. A few scenes later, he shows us his vast collection of laminated Pokémon cards and a glittering show of Pokemon Stadium on an old worn TV. After "Hurt" became viral and Lean became famous, he introduced us to the rest of his burnout career with which he stormed the streets of Stockholm; of course, they called The Sad Boys.
Nobody can say for sure why Lean has found a way to express themselves with the N64. The console is not intrinsically All that he inspires is sad, and it is not less the art inspired by Lil Yachty, of Atlanta, who, in 2016, used the iconic pan flute at the beginning of Super Mario 64 boast of the beautiful life that he lived. But it is clear that the orchestral legacy left by the N64 has something bitter taste for those who have experienced it. The famous Nintendo brand has not sent a chip in the bowels of the first 3D console of the company, and you can say that these limitations are manifested in the slow movements slow idle permanently housed in our brains.
I think that another theory is more likely. The first 3D consoles represented developers exploring a wider emotional range with the games they made. I mean, the tonal differences between A link to the past and Ocarina of Time are clear. This ambition required a sadder and more temperate MIDI, rather than the catchy anthems of the SNES, which engendered the enemy's cold Super Mario 64. The way it intersects your own nostalgia depends on your mileage, but Besley told me that he had remixed "Tell Dire Dock" specifically because he had the impression that there was an accidental and strange connection with the discreet and rainy sound that he was already listening to. "For me, it always gave me the same itching," he says. It must count for something.
Nobody is taking advantage of N64 nostalgia right now. At E X, Besley and Clark all work in SoundClouds and BandCamps, the de facto platforms for part-timers in the music industry. They download their tracks for free on YouTube. If there is to be a real star of the group, this has not happened yet, although that does not seem to be a scene preoccupied with this type of benchmark. In the meantime, the artists I mentioned are working hard on monitoring. A L E X released Grow up Vol 2 in June, and Clark is in the middle of a sequel to Z E L D A W A V E, what he says will focus on new remixes of Mask of Majora Songs. He intends to release the disc before the end of the year.
Clark told me that he specifically released Z E L D A W A V E as a video mix on YouTube because he liked the idea that people assume that it was the work of a global hive spirit, rather than a singular architect. It's a strangely ego-free enterprise, but I also think it says a lot about the ethics of this scene. All these artists, in their own way, fight for the sacredness of their memories. The resonance of a disc like Z E L D A W A V E rests squarely on the ability of an audience to mourn little things; stumble into a big fairy fountain, greet the Big Goron, say goodbye to Saria for the last time. The art is so often the consolidated experience and virtuosity of one person. That is not the case here. The beauty is that everyone who grew up on N64 feels like the author. Touch it, taste it and sympathize.
"In a way, I think that nostalgia informs us that all great things will eventually end, and that's good," Clark says. "You will always have memories and feelings to reflect on, but the value of our favorite things comes from the fact that the experiences do not last forever."
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego, currently living in Brooklyn. Besides Kotaku, he collaborates with Vice, PC Gamer, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Polygon.
Source link
