Review: Autechre, Exai (Warp234)

Digital copies of Exai, the eleventh album by British glitch pioneers Autechre, appeared online yesterday afternoon at 2.39pm GMT, a month earlier than expected. Following the lead of a number of earlier releases (‘Tri Repetae’, ‘LP5’, ‘EP7’, ‘Draft 7.30’, ‘Move of Ten’ etc etc), the album’s oblique title makes reference to its numerical place in the ongoing Booth/Brown Collected Works, in this case ‘XI’ - eleven. For the code-hunting Autechre listener (and is there any other kind?), even the Warp catalogue number (234) catches the eye... Does this recording bear any relation to an elusive Warp123?

Warp Record #123, it turns out, was the 2005 album The Campfire Headphase by Boards of Canada, an assortment of acoustic guitars and ambient synthesizer that was seen by magazines such as ‘Under the Radar’ (in their 11th issue) as a masterpiece of modern pastoralia, an ecological album that foresaw an age in which “we’re all wiped off the planet by environmental destruction”. Opening with a grim masterclass in inorganic glitch entitled ‘Fleure’ (or ‘flower’), Exai might be seen as fulfilling the dystopian prophecy of BoC’s disc, offering some of the most forbidding soundscapes since their own Confield (2001), an album whose title already evoked a paradoxical fusion between the organic (‘corn field’) and the artificial (a synthetic ‘con’).

Coming after the increasingly approachable drone/ambient aural pallette of Booth and Brown’s recent output (as heard in Oversteps), the opening flurry of ‘Fleure’ suggests at first a straight return to the more hostile data-world of their great Mechanized Trilogy (Confield-Draft 7.30-Untilted), a shocking body of work that still ranks, a decade later, among the most challenging electronic music ever released by a major(ish) label. The indelible generative sequences are back, multiplying across the stereo field like tinfoil bacteria, an arrhythmic scribble of sound that is as immediately recognisable as the warped Martian blues of Don Van Vliet or the atonal sheets of sound of John Coltrane. At 2:52 in ‘Fleure’, however, the surface percussion disappears, leaving us in a gurgling soup of organic sound, punctuated by occasional depth-charge blasts (the spherical mines in a submarine epic) that resolutely fail to cohere into a sustained percussive line. The metallic skin has been shed, and for two minutes Booth and Brown explore the kind of harmonically driven soundworld found throughout their previous album, here framed by something altogether more austere. The combined effect (especially as witnessed via headphones) is of an unprecedented layering, from the surface of the mechanical ‘fleure’ to the liquid ‘xylem rooms’ within, a weird hybrid of two prior Autechres (so seemingly distinct).

This musical palimpsest, shifting between various aural strata, becomes one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Exai, an album that spans four LPs (precisely the kind of extravagance that Warner Bros famously denied Frank Zappa for his mid-70s Läther project). Granted such a gigantic canvas, tracks are able to fold and wrap in a far more prolonged manner than ever before, with ‘bladelores’, ‘cloudline’, and ‘irlite’ (the latter surely a reference to Mahler's 'Urlicht'?) ranking among the lengthiest tracks of the group’s discography. Even the shorter tracks on Exai - such as the three that make up the second side of the first LP (tracks 3-5) - are bound to one another far more closely than on any previous album, with the buzzing percussion at the end of ‘prac-f’ (for example) dropping immediately into the wash of synthesized sound at the start of ‘jatevee C’. The effect is almost identical to the sudden disappearance of the beat in the middle of the preceding ‘irlite’ (at 4:29), rendering track division far more subtle than was seen on an album such as Quaristice, where each recording felt truly separate - a FLAC file from the Booth/Brown collection arbitrarily dropped into an album-length set. 

The overall result of this deliberate sense of expansion, both within and between tracks, is that Exai feels altogether more ‘live’ than the Confield-Draft-Untilted trilogy, its eight sides of vinyl (in the forthcoming physical release) each coming close to the ‘jam’ aesthetic of the EP-only 2008 track ‘Perlence Subrange 6-36’, a 58-minute piece whose improvisatory appeal seemed irreconcilable with the surgical precision of the albums it succeeded. This generous set seems to aspire to a defiant synthesis, offering an extended redefinition (after 10 albums) of the kinds of music-making that might be recorded/released under the Autechre banner. At times the phase/flange effects and distinctive stabs of organ/synth chords give the unexpected impression of a Bitches Brew touring band (albeit one made up entirely of husks of Cold War computer equipment). The odd effect is heightened by the intrusion of garbled vocals in ‘deco Loc’, and by the surprisingly danceable nature of the layers of percussion found throughout the album, from the basement hammering of ‘vekoS’ and ‘recks on’ to the sci-fi shuffle of ‘bladelores’.

In 1994, Booth and Brown responded to the Major government’s notorious ‘Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’ (a draconian attempt to outlaw rave culture through banning events at which the music bore “a succession of repetitive beats”) with their Anti EP, a recording which advised DJs to "have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment." Nearly two decades later, the duo have returned with their first album under a new Conservative parliament (Oversteps arrived almost 100 days before Cameron and co), and while Exai is offered for consumption without a lawyer present, it nevertheless restores to their music a sense of terpsichorean urgency, and an occasional fury that renders tracks like ‘spl9’ among the most abrasive slices of arrhythmia ever to grace a Warp LP. 

From its opening puzzle (5 seconds of what seems to be pure silence?) to the soaring electronic tintinnabulations of ‘YJY UX’, Exai is Autechre’s grandest statement yet, and - arriving just six weeks into 2013 - a safe bet for the album of the year.

The Many Masks of Django (Unchained)

 

Blessed with its impossibly brilliant title, the concluding chapter of Tarantino’s 2009 masterpiece Inglourious Basterds (‘The Revenge of the Giant Face’) was an apocalyptic homage to the closing sequence of Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the pages of Pynchon’s book were transformed into the screen of a doomed picturehouse:

“The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out... And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see: it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know – ” (p. 775)

With his latest film, Django Unchained, Tarantino seems to have abandoned the labyrinthine Nazi-haunted wasteland of Pynchon’s 1973 epic in favour of the postmodern American pastoral of Mason & Dixon (1997), adopting a forgivingly linear structure for his glorious widescreen view of the Western (and Southern) landscape, peopling its antebellum setting with a more carefully rendered pair of male protagonists. If First Special Service Force Lieutenant Aldo Raine and Staff Sergeant Donny Donowitz were dark satirical ciphers worthy of Pynchon’s Pirate Prentice and Tyrone Slothrop, then Dr. King Schultz and Django Freeman are Tarantino’s answer to the more human Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, wry ‘astronomy aficionados’, haunted by a missing wife and trudging beneath the ‘Stars that travel in arcs upon the Sky’ (p. 332).

With this stylistic transformation, the scale of Tarantino’s ambition (and, depending on whether you ask Roger Ebert or Anthony Lane, his achievement) begins to become apparent. The director has told the BBC’s Film Programme that his new feature bears a “symbiotic relationship” to Inglourious Basterds, and their running times are so nearly identical (165 and 153 minutes, respectively) that it is tempting to imagine screening both films simultaneously, side by side, in the manner of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966): 

The most striking element of this strangely shared identity is, of course, the German actor Christoph Waltz, whose SD Colonel Hans Landa was the exact opposite of the fatally compassionate dentist/bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz. Where Tarantino’s earlier film contrasted the abysmal consequences of German fascism with the scalp-taking baseball-bat-wielding freedom loving American ‘basterds’, in Django Unchained we see the horrors of American slavery through the eyes of a cultured, multilingual, freedom loving German.

In any hypothetical Warholian twin-screening of these films, it would be possible to observe the eerily similar, yet utterly opposed, words, manners and movements of Waltz’s identical siblings. Language and German high culture itself are the tools of both his Landa and Schultz, to brutalize or to elevate – indeed, the plot of Django Unchained relies upon a fundamental equation between Django Freeman and the Wagnerian Siegfried (a resemblance that would have surely eluded the composer himself). Similarly, that ubiquitous scrap of Beethoven ephemera, the 1810 Bagatelle in A minor posthumously nicknamed Für Elise, crops up in both films in radically different contexts: in Inglourious Basterds the melody appears in an Ennio Morricone arrangement (entitled ‘La Condanna’) over the infamous opening interrogation, immediately establishing the strange Reich-Spaghetti aesthetic of the film. If Beethoven’s music was thus associated with the sinister German forces, in Django Unchained the bagatelle (performed upon a harp in the slaver’s mansion) serves an antithetical role, becoming the fatal reminder of civilization to the trapped and despairing Dr. Schultz, inspiring his final altercation with Calvin Candie. The initial form of this confrontation – as Schultz exposes Candie’s ignorance of Alexandre Dumas’s ethnicity – may well stem from the popular notion (noted in Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, 1866, p. 134) that the German composer was himself of partly African origin. The damning significance of biographical data such as this, in the abysmal territory of Tarantino’s South, is gradually dawning on the dentist in the film’s closing scenes: as Django remarked, earlier in the film, “I’m a little more used to America than he is.”

The growing sense of an antithetical relationship between these two films, first highlighted by Waltz’s casting (and gradually expanded to encompass race, nationality, and even music), is compounded by Tarantino’s announcement, in December of 2012, that he is already at work on “the third of the trilogy. It would be called Killer Crow,” a film set in Europe in 1944 and dealing with “black troops [who] have been fucked over by the American military.” The director’s postmodern historical trilogy thus takes the following approximate form: 1) German hell witnessed by Americans, 2) American hell witnessed by German, 3) American hell enters German hell. In classic Hegelian terms (as popularized by Heinrich Chalybäus in 1837), Tarantino’s three films might be seen as a low-genre parody of German dialectic structure – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – integrating an abstract notion with concrete artistic form in much the same way as did the sonata form perfected by Beethoven (ie. exposition, development, recapitulation).

In passing, it is worth noticing that the as yet unmade third film of this trilogy (whether it be tagged ‘recapitulation’ or ‘synthesis’) seems already to bear a subtle corrective to its predecessor: its titular reference to the American Jim Crow laws that ran from 1876-1965, reminds us that events such as those fantasized in Django Unchained (and even during the Civil War that followed) did little to ease the realities of African-American life prior to the late twentieth century. In this grim context, the historical associations of the director’s ‘Emancipation Trilogy’ start to come into focus, as we notice that Waltz’s martyred Dr. King Schultz, as well as recalling the name of a 1971 spaghetti western character, points in the direction of a more famous Dr. King, another man more “used to America than he”…

In depicting what Spike Lee has called (in a critical tweet) the “holocaust” of slavery, Tarantino takes evident pains to distinguish this American event from the European horror glimpsed in Inglourious Basterds. This care is evident throughout the director’s original screenplay, a document which is strikingly specific about almost every aspect of the production, down to the subtlest detail (‘Red blood splashes on white cotton’, p. 34). In the photocopied pages of the text, we see that while the slaving town of Greenville is viewed as a “spectacle out of Dante” (p. 54), the unforgettably-named plantation of Candyland is manifestly not a “hell on earth, Auschwitz”, but is “very beautiful. The fields of cotton, the way the trees hang green vines over everything. It’s full of nature and nature’s vibrant colors, and a broiling hot sun to set it all in” (p. 89):

This deliberate separation from the German ‘thesis’ (Auschwitz) remains absolutely central to the later film, as the fundamental state of being for the Jewish refugee (physical concealment, as introduced in the harrowing opening scene with Hans Landa pacing above the hidden family) is compared with that of the American slave. The slave, Tarantino suggests, lacks an authentic American history prior to slavery, and thus cannot hide from the system of oppression. Instead, African-American identity is seen as emerging throughout the film as a series of masks and roles, from the the grotesque ‘Uncle Tom’ of Samuel L. Jackson’s Stephen to the ‘Blue Boy’ of Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 painting:

This series of inauthentic ‘roles’ is simultaneously troubling and, in a postmodern work such as Django Unchained, liberating. Like Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow (or Henry Burlingame in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor), the possibilities of shapeshifting tumble open before Django Freeman. Tarantino’s screenplay describes their shared situation as a prolonged ‘Masquerade’ (p. 112), a process that is set in motion when the hero is required to adopt the most detestable role of all: that of a black Mandingo expert. When Django tells Schultz that there “ain’t nothing lower than a black slaver,” the dentist replies craftily, “well then, play him that way! Give me your black slaver.” In this guise, Freeman is forced to witness (and become complicit in) acts of shocking brutality, and gradually begins to craft an additional mask of his own: that of the aggressive braggadocio, a point brilliantly underlined as a unique (Tarantino-requested) track by Def Jam’s Rick Ross booms across the film’s soundtrack, accompanying the admiring gaze of his well-dressed wife. This moment, combined with later similarly anachronistic (non-diegetic) instances of James Brown and 2Pac, heightens the growing sense of the American holocaust as a formative moment in the maturation of both a sub-culture and of the nation itself.

In a crucial respect, the acts of concealment and inauthenticity seen throughout Django’s Shelleyan quest for vengeance (the slave unchained becoming an antebellum ‘Prometheus Unbound’) gradually come to stand for Tarantino’s America itself, in which Candyland stands so “very beautiful”, a deceptive front for what the screenplay explicitly refers to as a Wagnerian prison, the “Ring of Hellfire” (p. 166). This façade is deliberately preceded and anticipated by the exclusive Mandingo fight hotspot ‘The Cleopatra Club’, a bastardization of African history inhabited by fake Shebas, Cleos, and pasteboard Sphinxes.

Candyland mansion itself is much less obviously ‘fake’, even if the white pillars (like the President’s house itself?) seem a little hollow, compared to their Classical antecedents. Calvin Candie, however, turns out to be as much an actor as his guests – clearly unfamiliar with Alexandre Dumas, he is in fact (despite his preference for the title ‘Monsieur Candie’) unable to speak French. While Stephen wears the mask of the buffoon, Calvin desperately affects the wisdom of the armchair phrenologist and linguist. Indeed, it is presumably under his roof that the name ‘Brünnhilde von Schaft’ became mangled into ‘Broomhilda von Shaft’, a mishearing that manages to simultaneously lower her permanently to her ‘role’ as broom-handler, and to grant her a flash of anticipated glory as the heroine of a 1971 blaxploitation classic.

With Dr. King Schultz’s climactic revelation that Calvin Candie is an intellectual fraud comes his own belated recognition (courtesy of Stephen) of Django and King’s attempted hoax, at which the film, like Inglourious Basterds before it, totters into its apocalyptic final moments – a Wagnerian unveiling, and an MGM scale Redneck-dämmerung. Following a tide of blood-letting, Django marches down the wooden mansion’s stairs towards the wounded Stephen, recounting the numbers of the voiceless dead in a speech that echoes the ‘Ezekiel’ speech of Jackson’s own Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction (1994):

“76 years, Stephen. How many niggers do you think you’ve seen come and go? Huh? Seven thousand? Eight thousand? Nine thousand? Nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine? Every single word that came out of Calvin Candie’s mouth was nothing but horseshit. But he was right about one thing. I am that one nigger in ten thousand.”

Following this grim farewell, however, Django does not shoot old Stephen. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote, he lights (with his cigarette!) an extended dynamite fuse, a sizzling line that snakes ludicrously up around the doorway and back, almost like the lettering above a Vegas show: D-J-A-N-G-O. For while Inglorious Basterds ended with a cinema being transformed into a weapon, Django Unchained concludes with its titular character recognizing the nature of the wooden ‘film set’ that is Candyland (a mirage as hollow as Schultz’s tooth-on-a-spring), and blowing the flimsy structure into Looney Tunes smithereens.

And with this, Django is at last allowed to step through the mirror, entering his own triumphant no-space beyond Time, in which he becomes the grinning Trickster, teaching his horse to pimp-dance to the tune of ‘Trinity’ by Franco Micalizzi (“keeps the varmints on the run, boy”), and floating out of his antebellum nightmare. The redemptive coyote-like figure turns away from the burning set, and follows the stars back North, and to Schultz’s Europe. Killer Crow can’t come quickly enough.

John Carter's Century

In late February 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Under the Moons of Mars” appeared in the pages of an obscure American pulp fiction magazine (All-Story) under the unassuming pen-name of ‘Norman Bean’.

In early March 2012, exactly 100 years later, a $250m IMAX 3D film was released across the globe, entitled John Carter. The film is directed by Andrew Stanton (the creator of Wall.E), and written by Michael Chabon, the genius-with-a-Pulitzer-to-prove-it behind such epochal novels as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Despite the presence of these names, and of respectable™ acting talent (albeit CGI-obscured) including Willem Defoe, Dominic West and Samantha Morton, the film seems to have been an all-round commercial disaster. Belying its quarter-of-a-billion budget, John Carter opened second in the US box office, making just $30m in its opening weekend, and notching up the rather fragile score of 53/100 on the oracular metacritic.com.

The century that separates ‘Norman Bean’s triumph from Stanton and Chabon’s apparent disaster was, of course, a turbulent one. Just two years after “Under the Moons of Mars”, the world experienced global conflict for the first time, only to repeat the experiment two decades later. By the time Burroughs died in 1950, America and the USSR were heading towards nuclear standoff, and a militarily fueled race into the solar system that the author had (scientifically dubiously) imagined for us all. In these decades, Burroughs’s fiction was a constant draw for the new medium of cinema, and if Warner Bros’ anarchic savant Bob Clampett had succeeded in funding his bizarrely rotoscoped 1936 project, it would have beaten Disney’s 1937 Snow White to become the world’s first animated feature film:

In the years following Clampett’s aborted project, and E.R. Burroughs’s death, Jason & the Argonauts’ visionary, Ray Harryhausen, frequently expressed his desire to bring John Carter to the big screen, a project for which no models or sketches survive, but which would, no doubt, have blown a thousand 10-year-old minds:

Once Harryhausen moved on to other pastures, and after Robert Rodriguez gave up on the idea of making John Carter his follow-up to Sin City, the project at last arrived at Disney, the financial home of Clampett’s rival, Snow White, in the hands of Stanton and Chabon (two childhood fans of Burroughs).

In the summer of 2011, when the first teaser trailer for the film was released, it became apparent that ‘Norman Bean’ had found a truly devoted pair to bring his vision to the IMAX:

The ponderous teaser reportedly infuriated the Disney studio, with its deliberate emphasis on Burroughs’s strange framing device; “Under the Moons of Mars” was originally set back in 1866, with ‘John Carter’ as a dislocated symbol of the antebellum South, a Virginian captain who served in the American Civil War. The sandy wastes of Mars, populated by foreign beings and customs, were thus a cracked mirror to the American West, the desert land that eventually separated Burroughs himself (dying in California) from the Illinois of his birth.

The intriguing material in this trailer, recalling the glorious melancholy of Wall.E’s opening half-hour, was not popular with Stanton’s studio. Despite their early concern, however, it is perhaps the later, effects and action-orientated scenes (filling subsequent trailers) which ought to have caused them worry. The extent to which George Lucas had ‘borrowed’ from Burroughs’s books in creating Star Wars (1977) is staggering (either lifting names directly – the Sith – or ‘adapting them’: John Carter’s ‘banths’, giant cows, become his own ‘banthas’, also giant cows; Princess Dejah in a metallic bikini on a flying boat becomes Princess Leia in a metallic bikini on a flying boat…); adapting the book since 1977 presents the unique challenge of adapting an ‘original’ in the shadow of a ubiquitous ‘copy’: as Stanton puts it, the film is perilously close to becoming a 'xerox of a xerox'.

One route open to Stanton and Chabon would, of course, have been that followed by James Cameron in Avatar (2009): to derive material and ideas from Burroughs while bringing him scientifically up-to-date. Cameron’s visually splendid world is also, realistically, toxic to human lungs, for example, and on Pandora any interaction with alien bodies is facilitated only through the 21^st-century cyber-technology of the title.

Instead of applying this kind of ‘sci-fi update’ mechanism, however, the filmmakers have chosen a much more unusual, and commercially risky, strategy. Looking back, in particular, to the swarm of 60s–80s genre cinema (the era when both artists were growing up, and falling in love with Burroughs’s work), Stanton and Chabon seemed to have seen, in this heap of VHS ‘trash’, an aesthetic palette with which to capture the paradoxical sense of familiarity/dislocation invoked in the original work. Burroughs’s deliberate decision, in 1912, to place John Carter’s story back in the Reconstruction-era turbulence of America circa 1866–1888 (the years in which the first three books, on which the film is largely based, are set) is an identical temporal jump as that taken by Stanton/Chabon in 2012. While following Burroughs’s specific emphasis on American history, they aesthetically turn the clock forward by a century for their models, looking at our own cultural record of 1966-88…

The twenty-two years (of exclusively genre cinema) to which the filmmaker/writer turn – mimicking in 2012 the retro-period-evocation Burroughs performed in 1912 – thus ranges deliberately from the science fiction/‘cave and sandals’ films of the late 1960s...

One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Mars Needs Women (1967)

Barbarella (1968)

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

...and ends with the visually-unmistakable fantasy epics (now filling the tape bins at car-boot sales) of the 1980s:

Flash Gordon (1980)

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Krull (1983)

Dune (1984)

Masters of the Universe (1987)

Refusing to update their material, Chabon (whose retro novel covers enact a similar temporal leap) and Stanton thus choose to create an aesthetic time capsule, a Tarantino-style experiment in genre recreation. Fleeing the shadow of James Cameron, the filmmakers have created an unexpected childhood fantasy. Their experiment, ominously for the money-counters at Disney, resembles another recent wonder (that also fared disastrously with audiences): Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (In a further instance of retro-detailing, the gung-ho horse & pistols portrait of 1860s America with which Stanton's film begins bears the unmistakable 1981 stamp of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

Where Steven Spielberg chose, in his 2008 film, to create a haunted image of the 1950s, complete with UFOs and bomb-paranoia, this century-old John Carter emerges as a gigantic VHS-tape hero, burdened with the weight of American history, and transplanted onto an IMAX screen, in 21^st century 3D. The resulting film, probably the most risky quarter-of-a-billion Disney have ever spent, is a unique collaboration between two gifted artists: a bizarre reconstruction of a wasteland of kitsch, and an evocation of a 22-year long cultural period as alien to us as the Civil War was to Carter's original creator, the mysterious 'Norman Bean'.

Greatest Video Games of All Time, Part III: 2000s

10. Eternal Darkness (2002, Denis Dyack)

The first Nintendo title to be rated ‘M for Mature’, Eternal Darkness marked a new phase in interactive horror. Taking his cue from the invasive methods of Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy VII, Dyack represents the protaganist’s deteriorating sanity by interfering with their control pad, and limiting or inverting the desired action. As the narrative progresses, these peculiar ‘Sanity Effects’ become progressively further removed from the artificial world, and start to enter the ‘real’: the television channel might accidentally ‘change’, or the screen abruptly warn that the ‘controller has been unplugged’. Manipulating the real-life fears of the hardware user becomes increasingly unexpected, and distressing: most memorably in the sadistic moment photographed above. It is in bizarre instances such as this that Dyack’s experimental debut work truly earns its faintly camp, gothic subtitle: Sanity’s Requiem.

9. Scribblenauts (2009, Jeremiah Slaczka)

Following on from his original but flawed debut, Drawn To Life (in which the DS user was expected to create the key graphics from scratch), Jeremiah Slaczka and his team at 5^th Cell went in a new direction with their second title. If their debut was a fundamentally empty title, awaiting user input, Scribblenauts is a contrasting monument to designer excess: over a period of two years, the developers trawled through their dictionaries, loading over 10,000 items into the ‘Objectnaut’ engine. One of the most ambitious projects in digital history, the basis of the puzzles can be summed up by the slogan ‘Write Anything – Solve Everything’: the player is encouraged to write the most non-literal, creative solutions to the onscreen challenge. Your character needs to enter a tunnel on the other side of a river? Try summoning a Kraken, a helicopter, a shrink ray, and a pirate ship… A magnificent example of the near-infinities that can be contained in a well-designed toy.

8. Ōkami​ (2006, Hideki Kamiya)

Of recent videogames, few have been as explicitly inspired by an artistic-movement as Hideki Kamiya’s Ōkami​ (indeed, only Mizuguchi’s Rez, with its huge debt to Wassily Kandinsky, comes close). An homage to classic Japanese watercolour painting, the cel-shaded 3D aesthetic was quite unique in 2006, and remains so (despite imitations) today. The art concept is also boldly incorporated into the interface, as key actions are performed by the using Zen calligraphy motions with the Wii controller, painting ideograms in the air. Kamiya stands out as one of the few genuine auteurs in modern design, heavily visually focused, but able to draw together an incredible range of elements into a warped whole. His bizarre genius was glimpsed again in his 2010 follow-up title, Bayonetta, which fused together folk music, Renaissance religious art, disco, European architecture, and a terrifying heroine to make Quentin Tarantino proud.

7. God of War (2005, David Jaffe)

The most successful films based on Greek mythology – Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949), Disney’s Hercules (1997), or the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) – have always strayed from their source material, either resituating the familiar stories in different eras and continents, or undermining the grim seriousness of the original altogether. Only the various Ray Harryhausen epics have ever really come close to recasting the ancient mythical world as cinema, and the less said about the cringe-inducing Laurence Olivier-dominated Mount Olympus in Clash of the Titans (1981) the better. It comes as no small surprise, then, that the most compelling visual realization of this literary tradition came in 2005, with David Jaffe’s operatic God of War, a vast depiction of a battle between a Spartan and Ares, that has been followed up by two (even vaster) sequels. The world of Hades, the awesome scale of the gods, the physical enormity of the Titans, the terror of the gorgons: none of these things have ever been portrayed more vividly, or more accurately... Over the sublime trilogy, we encounter almost every character in Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, from the famous (Theseus) to the obscure (Euryale), and every leering, terrifying monster. A huge, encyclopedic achievement, Jaffe’s trilogy shows the Homeric vision that has eluded a century of cinema.

6. Psychonauts (2005, Tim Schafer)

Guided by an inspired concept – a sort of mental InnerSpace – Tim Schafer’s follow-up to Grim Fandango applies the subtle storytelling, unsettling environments, and brilliant comedy of his masterpiece to the apparently unrelated genre of the console platformer. Inspired by a one-off peyote experience, the psychedelic idea of exploring another character’s brain allows for a uniquely unhinged environment, as our hero ‘Razputin’ undergoes training at a US government lab (disguised as a children’s summer camp). Far more inventive than anything from the Pixar studio – let-alone Dreamworks – the work as a whole suggests that Schafer is among the leading animators of the decade (perhaps joined now, by Ron Gilbert, with DeathSpank). These two artists are using their cartoon-inspired design to tell some of the most ambitious and hilarious stories ever told in the medium.

5. Resident Evil 4 (2005, Shinji Mikami)

The most purely terrifying experience in any interactive medium so far, Resident Evil 4 takes its place proudly alongside The Blair Witch Project, Evil Dead 2, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Wicker Man as one of the great rural horror stories of the modern era. Departing from the familiar zombie-infested interiors of the first three titles in the series, Mikami’s masterpiece takes us to a remote Spanish village and its surroundings, in which a Cronenberg-style parasite known as Las Plagas (‘the plague’) has infected the majority of the farming inhabitants. Unlike traditional ‘shooter’ games, the 'survival horror' framework allows for only an extremely limited amount of health and ammunition, leading for a virtual reality world of unusual vulnerability, compared to Half-Life, or Doom. All of this, of course, makes the experience even more terrifying. If things all get too much, however, it is (thankfully) possible to follow in the steps of Sam Raimi, up the camp-level and grab the chainsaw. Groovy.

4. Portal (2007, Erik Wolpaw)

With a stunningly original physics concept, a bleak-comic script by Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts co-writer Erik Wolpaw, and a masterfully gradual revelation of the Kubrick-inspired scenario underlying the entire simulation, Portal is a work of near total perfection. In any artform it is preciously rare for any combination to work so precisely: in few films, for example, is the balance of event and storytelling matched so skillfully, and no previous title challenges with the logical grace and aesthetic beauty of Valve’s masterpiece. Where Half-Life 2 was content to repeat the basic successes of its predecessor in high definition, Portal invented something entirely new. The designers explore the basic realities of ‘Space’ in a manner impossible in any other previous medium, matching and surpassing the non-Euclidean geometry explored in Echochrome, and the non-linear sense of time in 2008’s Braid. Ultimately, it is perhaps worth leaving the ‘last word’ on this 21^st-century Escher-derived masterpiece to the brilliant Steve Meretzky. Watch his hilarious hymn to the world of Portal here.

3. Heavy Rain (2010, David Cage)

Comparing the history of interactive storytelling with that of cinema, we soon hit the striking fact that the videogame medium is only 38 years old (considering 1972’s Pong as a starting point), the narrow sliver of time that separates the first films of the Lumière brothers from the original King Kong (1933). For such a young medium, the maturity of a work such as Heavy Rain is quite astonishing, showing the fully absorbed sense of quasi-ethical ‘choice’ that is central to the interactive experience, separating it from cinema as much as the spectacle of Kong was separate from the world of the theatre that spawned it. A work of unprecedented subtlety, David Cage’s interactive narrative follows four everyday characters with realistic motives: a father, a drug addict, a lonely woman, and a noirish detective. Some of the most impressive moments are those which draw the player into their most mundane moments, exploring the sense of melancholia surrounding an old amnesiac lady in a hospital ward, or the dizzying terror of losing a child in a crowded shopping mall. Through the sense of expanded time that the interactive medium enjoys over cinema, it is possible to let these moments linger, to leave a character in the company of another, to dwell in the wash of passing moments that shape their lives. Praised by artists as diverse as Terry Gilliam and Nicholas Roeg, David Cage’s tragic story is the first masterpiece of the new decade.

2. Shadow of the Colossus (2005, Fumito Ueda)

Released in the winter of 2005, eight months after God of War, Fumito Ueda’s Shadow of the Colossus takes place on an unprecedentedly large canvas, even more epic than David Jaffe’s: a lone rider (with the Schubertian name of ‘Wander’) crosses a vast deserted mountainscape, seeking out, and murdering, a series of rather god-like titanic forms. There are no linking tasks at all, creating a deliberate sense of emptiness as we travel through the natural world, and the moral justification for the occasional acts of violence is never provided. This sense of doubt, combined with the awesome scale of the nemeses, creates the dawning suspicion that the series of ‘boss’ battles is a part of a deliberate ethical reflection on the role of goal-orientedness in modern interactive narratives, and on the connection between this and theological stories in general. The expanse of Nature, and sense of scale, links with the philosophical Sublime first explored by Edmund Burke in 1757, confirming the unexpected but crucial intellectual overlap between Fumito Ueda’s work and the cinema of his most comparable artist, Terrence Malick.

1. Fallout 3 / New Vegas (2008, Todd Howard; 2010, Chris Avellone)

“There are all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose instead of the big story... the macro story. That really interests me as a storyteller, because I've always thought that one of the things that the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end – to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between."

These comments, made by one of our greatest living writers, Salman Rushdie, confirm the importance of videogames to any conception of storytelling in the 21^st century. “Digression, alternative possibilities”, and “telling stories sideways” are techniques that have remained central to mainstream and experimental literature from Homer’s time to today, and the three categories apply to some of the most significant novels in history, including Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Moby-Dick. It is in today's ‘interactive’ narratives that they are most richly explored, however, and in the past couple of years graphical worlds have at last expanded to accommodate this level of authorial ambition. It is perhaps unsurprising that the greatest 3D world of all has been designed and populated by the writers behind the largest (and arguably most literary) verbal worlds of the 1990s – namely Chris Avellone and his team, who created Planescape: Torment and the original two Fallout titles. The enormous dialogue trees and narrative digressions of these three classics were met, in 2008, with a virtual world to match. Fallout 3, a work of chilling retro-futurism, reveals the year 2277, as seen through the eyes of the first nuclear age – the 1950s. This inspired aesthetic juxtaposition has run throughout the series (and was famously copied by Ken Levine for BioShock), but reaches its apotheosis in the 3D world of this third title, as the unsettling future made possible in the test sites of Alamogordo and Nevada is brought into full digital life. The music, coming through the protagonist’s portable radio receiver, reveals the disturbing fixation the popular music of the era had with the apocalyptic weapon, as the Andrews Sisters look hopelessly at western civilization (“they have things like the atom bomb / I think I’ll stay where I om”), and The Ink Spots declare that they “don’t want to set the world on fire”… This use of unexpected cultural debris (one storyline concerns a Stradivarius violin and a Bach-obsessed widow of the Waste Land) elevates the apocalyptic narrative to the level of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, whilst the underlying sense of humour hints at the pitch black comedy of Dr. Strangelove.

The huge map of Washington D.C. was gradually expanded (through download) to include the remains of Pittsburgh, Alaska, and the Maryland swamps, and subsequently (in a 2010 disc) Las Vegas and the Mojave desert itself. This combined vision of apocalyptic America, seen through 1950s eyes, is haunting and unforgettable, a world with far more emphasis on dialogue than combat (as in Resident Evil, the protagonist is fundamentally more vulnerable than in a ‘shooter’), and with the staggering range of “excursions, digressions, and alternative possibilities” that so impressed Rushdie. The story encompasses the entire range of human experience, beginning with the character’s onscreen birth (viewed in the first-person), passing briefly through adolescence, and leading inevitably into the fallen world outside. An ongoing cycle of day and night (borrowed from Oblivion, Todd Howard’s previous work) combines with the limitless juxtapositions of the 3^rd-person camera (unique to the player’s companions, attire, and location), making for arguably the most expansive literary world ever produced, in which it is possible to walk alone through a deserted casino at dawn wearing a 1950s space suit, or to swim through an empty battleship wearing a cowboy hat at night, or to explore a ruined village of atom-bomb worshippers accompanied by a loyal canine companion, sporting the tattered uniform of the Vault. These retro-futurist images feel uniquely personal to the individual experiencing them (and are), but also recall throughout the peculiar work of Thomas Pynchon, most of all Gravity’s Rainbow, rivaling even his imagination for outlandish, but weirdly profound, imagery. An inspired breed of science-fiction storytelling, infused with satire and politics, Fallout 3 surpasses anything similar in American culture since the peak of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, fifty years ago. Welcome to the future.