Tats and Tapes

New ink, old media, and a boss theme that's a bit too groovy.

Keeping a feather up

I got a tattoo last week. It's my second one, following my ink of the symbol for a runner on third base in baseball (for the story behind that, see my book Stealing Home: Rookie Season).

If you recognise this feather, then you are one of the many lucky people who have played the game Celeste, a notoriously difficult but highly rewarding, beautiful and deep pixel art platformer about climbing a mountain, with strong themes of mental health, courage and personal growth. I played it a few years ago during a period when my mental health wasn't great, and it was a sanctuary, a haven, and an uplifting patch of brightness.

It was all of those things to me after just the first two levels. And then I came to the game’s middle section, in which the main character, Madeline, has a panic attack while riding a cable car. Darkness closes in, before her travelling companion Theo tells her about a trick to get through it: picture a feather in front of you, and imagine that your breathing is keeping it afloat. The game then makes the player keep said feather floating inside a box with gentle button pushes.

It's an amazing gaming experience that had a profound effect on me, and helped me to reconnect with meditation and mindfulness practice. Having a reminder of it on my body helps me to remember to breathe through the tough moments. If you haven't played Celeste, I can't recommend it highly enough. It has one of my all-time favourite soundtracks by Lena Raine, one of the best VGM composers working today in my opinion.

Tapes are real

I recently bought both a cassette tape recorder and a cassette tape player, in what will no doubt be perceived as a pretentious or hipster move (if anyone even uses the term ‘hipster’ anymore - that actually feels a little too early 2010s now). Nonetheless, it's because I've been doing a lot of thinking about physical media of late, especially in the context of the ever-expanding miasma of AI-generated slop. Something that's on a tape, a disc or a record, or words that are in a paperback, feels more and more like an antidote to this dizzying digital churn.

So I’ve started recording some new lofi tracks onto tape. I’m intending to post some of them to YouTube soon, and when my next original lofi album is ready I am planning on a tape-exclusive release. It's actually not that expensive to get tapes made, especially compared to vinyl, which has had its production costs boom in recent years thanks to unscrupulous major label muscle-ins. Tapes, by contrast, feel unassuming, underrated, and quietly powerful.

I have many fond memories of making mixtapes as a child, recording tracks from other tapes or from CDs or from the radio, which I realise makes me sound impossibly old. I’m not. I’m a millennial (born in the late 80s), so tapes were a part of my early childhood that were rapidly eclipsed by CDs and Minidiscs, but tapes were there first, in all their humming and hissing glory, and I’m trying to reconnect with that to experience something real. It feels good! Give it a go if you want something that’s more than just another piece of content.

Rejected tracks, vol. 1: groovy boss theme

This week I’ve been working on a potential lead on composing for an indie game, and thought I’d share a track that wasn't quite right for what the dev was after, but that I enjoyed making. They wanted something a bit more mysterious/ominous, but early indications of their vision had pointed me towards this kind of groove. I’ll probably include it in a forthcoming pack of boss themes or something.

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