Weekend Reads (October 12): Aphex Twin, Horror Soundtracks, Green Day, “Halo”
Recommended weekend reading material for October 12, 2024.
I’m currently traveling for vacation, so this weekend’s newsletter is slightly shorter than usual. Normal broadcasting will resume next week.
Aphex Twin’s landmark Selected Ambient Works II was reissued earlier this month, and John Doran delves into the album’s history, including the role that LSD played in its creation.
It was Richard D James himself who made the association with LSD clear from the outset. For someone who didn’t like to be interviewed, he could be a quote machine when the inspiration took him. The idea that the album sounded like “standing in a power station. On acid” was unveiled during an NME news interview in January 1994, and the idea then expanded upon in The Face. The “power” of this statement flowed at different levels; it was the kind of performative rabble rousing copy that music magazines in the late 20th century thrived upon, but also summed up a difficult abstract affect expertly while distancing itself neatly from the then-ubiquitous formula x=y on acid. There is a great potency detectable in the peripheral sensory range when in or near a power station; the low but unequivocally baleful hum of a modernist temple whose potentially deadly strength could only be wondered at. Once you are aware of this, it makes sense to realise this so-called “ambient” music constitutes some of the heaviest work James ever composed.
The Discogs crew has compiled a list of 20 essential horror soundtracks, including Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, and Beyond the Black Rainbow.
What makes the best horror movie soundtrack? Tension, esoteric instruments, microtonal pitch changes, and, of course, heaps of disonance. Perhaps most important of all, though, is the concept of ambiguous ethereality: that feeling that something just isn’t right. The best horror soundtracks do this in subtle ways, slowly chipping away at that smug sense of safety and security you have. Working these elements into a complimentary, intricate web is a particulary unique challenge in the world of scoring. Channeling into ungrounded atonal compositions is not easy — which is perhaps why there are so many cheesy-sounding horror soundtracks. You won’t find any of those listed here.
Everyone loves it when their favorite albums are remastered. But Green Day took the opposite approach, “demastering” songs from their 1994 album Dookie to play on a variety of “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient” formats including floppy disk, wax cylinder, 8-track, and my favorite, a Teddy Ruxpin doll.
When an album hits a big milestone like its 30th anniversary, it gets the usual remasters on the usual formats. But Dookie isn’t a usual album.
Instead of smoothing out its edges and tweaking its dynamic ranges, this version of Dookie has been meticulously mangled to fit on formats with uncompromisingly low fidelity, from wax cylinders to answering machines to toothbrushes. The listening experience is unparalleled, sacrificing not only sonic quality, but also convenience, and occasionally entire verses.
The result is Dookie Demastered: the album that exploded the format of punk rock, re-exploded onto 15 obscure, obsolete, and otherwise inconvenient formats, the way it was never meant to be heard.
Each format contains a single Dookie track, and will be sold through its own individual drawing. I love everything about this.
I’m an unabashed Halo fan, and have been one for a long time. Which is why its arc in recent years has been frustrating, especially since 2021’s Halo Infinite was supposed to reinvigorate the franchise and usher in a new era. But some big changes are coming to Halo, including a switch to the Unreal Engine 5 game engine.
Halo Studios revealed its new direction in a video titled “A New Dawn,” which was shown before the final match at the 2024 Halo World Championship on Sunday. The video features talking heads from Halo Studios explaining Foundry, the engine change, and the reorganization, and it offers as a glimpse of what the future of Halo games will look like via footage of Foundry.
The Foundry test footage released shows three scenes: a classic Halo vista set on wooded mountain slopes, a moodily lit scene of snow and ice, and a gross alien world that has been completely overrun by the organic pestilence of the Flood. Master Chief and a Covenant Elite are shown wielding their iconic weapons, and a Banshee vehicle is also depicted. “The original Halo franchise was a graphics showcase, it was best in class,” lead FX artist Daniel Henley said in the video. “That’s what Halo was when it was first released, and that’s what Halo needs to be again.”
The newly renamed Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) have made it very clear that no new Halo games are on the immediate horizon, but the switch to the latest version of Unreal is encouraging. (Previous versions of Unreal have been used in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Fortnite, Gears of War 4, Sea of Thieves, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, to name a few.) Here’s hoping that any new Unreal-powered Halo games have suitably epic storylines to match their spiffy new graphics.
Related: To mark the 20th anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved, and to prep for the impending release of Halo Infinite, I posted a deep dive into the franchise’s elaborate mythology.
A 16-year-old claims to be the first person to fully beat Tetris, which was created by Alexey Pajitnov and originally released back in 1985.
Michael Artiaga, 16, claimed the historic moment of so-called “rebirth” while livestreaming himself playing Nintendo’s version of the game on Twitch on Sunday.
It took him 82 minutes to successfully clear level 255 on Tetris — the game’s highest. Artiaga, who streams as “dogplayingtetris,” celebrated and watched in shock as it started again from scratch.
Via 1440.
You can watch Artiaga’s impressive feat below. Skip to the 1:21:24 mark to see the actual “rebirth” moment as well as his appropriately excited response.
The hyperlink is the building block of the web, but it’s dying a slow death thanks to the efforts of Google and Meta.
If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal… That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, “My God, you’ll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works.” I’m like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.
Via Kottke.
By now, you might’ve seen the AI-generated image of a young girl holding a puppy in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Lars Daniel argues that such images are only going to hurt people in the long run.
The repeated exposure to fake content during disasters creates an emotional whiplash. People experience initial shock or sadness when they see images of devastation or distress, but when those images are debunked, it leads to feelings of betrayal, confusion or anger. This cycle can quickly wear down our ability to engage emotionally with real crises.
Sadly, we’re already seeing the effect that such images will have, as people — including political leaders — no longer seem to care about the truth. I’m currently working on a piece for Christ and Pop Culture that delves more deeply into this issue, and I look forward to sharing it with all of you.
The Internet Archive’s been having a rough go lately. There’s all of the controversy surrounding their book loaning program, of course, and earlier this week, they were subjected to a massive data breach and taken offline by a “denial-of-service” attack.
Of all of the places to attack, the Internet Archive seems like such an unlikely target, especially when there are so many juicy corporate and government sites out there. (Note: Opus does not condone the illegal or unauthorized hacking of any site or computer system.)
Finally, the “.io” top-level domain has been popular with tech and crypto-related sites, but recent geopolitical changes mean that it could disappear altogether, taking with it countless websites.
Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones.
Via Frontend Focus.
It’s easy to think of the web as something ephemeral that’s completely above such mundane things as countries and borders, but the effects of real world politics can’t be ignored — not even online. Also, the incident where Slovenian academics broke into the University of Belgrade and stole everything necessary to control the “.yu” top-level domain sounds like something out of a James Bond movie.
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