Playing Games Oneohtrix Point Never

Where?

Ah, yeah, Kilbi—I actually remember this. Everyone was sitting on the floor?

It was so impetuous. The way the gig came together was that I heard about RBMA Tokyo. Then Wulf [Gaebele] from Red Bull told me that there was going to be this video game aspect to it because he had remembered me talking about the style of video game that I was super obsessed with: bullet hell. In particular I was obsessed with this one composer of many bullet hell games called Manabu Namiki. Going back to when I was researching for R Plus Seven , my current album, I got really into this guy. So when Wulf mentioned it I thought, “wow, it would be cool to write some new music.” The idea was to make three to four pieces that were inspired by a specific idea or a specific object that I could think about and then let that inspire me and spin off into a piece of music.

Yeah, the four objects. The idea was to do a ritualistic homage, to create a spiritual environment to celebrate the particularities of this world of manic shooter, bullet hell games. The bouquet of flowers was picked because its colors were like the colors of the bullet fire. There was a portrait of Namiki-San as a kind of D-A-D. Further the guitar, a sacred instrument of the genre,…

Right, the “caution keep out” tape as a symbol that in bullet hell games you’re constantly being intimidated or warned that trouble is ahead—the warning becomes almost like a mantra. I was thinking about that stuff a lot and then I started writing music and ended up with those four pieces. The show itself was set up very hypothetical—over email I asked, “Can we get those objects and create something within the time frame between when I arrive and the performance?” or “Can we use the fog in the facility and shine the spotlight on each object?” It’s fairly simple—just these little details here and there that I like—but I’m so used to problems. I was so pleased that we were able to pull it off almost flawlessly. The instructions were perfectly executed. Also, these massive 70" flat screen displays: The games were vertically oriented. So it almost makes sense to play them on a vertically oriented screen. But that wasn’t necessarily the case in those arcades. When I played those games they were on emulators—you know televisions were too square to play, so they had margins with info or cartoons. But we were able to cut those margins and put just the gameplay up there. We got it directly from Cave [video game company]. So you were watching the most high quality gameplay you possibly could. The other thing I can say about bullet hell games is that musically, they are very rhythmic, very painterly. The way the spray of the bullet fire assembles and de-assembles itself to me is very musical and has a strange kind of abstraction already inherent within it. That was also inspiring to me. That together with Namiki’s crazy jazz-fusion combined with techno and metal. All those things that I love coming together plus the sound effects that are magical—it was so stimulating and seductive to me.

The music was a potpourri of things that were either related to Namiki or to Cave. Games like Battle Garegga, Bloody Roar, Ketsui , and some others. But that was not really as formal… I just had tones of source material and I tried to sculpt that into a formally interesting way.

We broke it down, it’s gone. But I think we have enough documentation of the show to replicate it in some way—almost as an installation. It doesn’t totally require me to be there if we get a good recording of the performance. I think it would look really cool.

Yeah, sometimes I feel that when I am playing live—because it’s always situated with this idea of a concert—I don’t achieve all the interesting idiosyncratic things I’d like to. So maybe there is potentially a different format where this is possible. It all depends on the idea… If the right context is there, it’s very exciting for me to think about ways music can be non-performative and still physical. Not a private, but a public thing that is not a performance and still musical—to me this is very interesting.

Yeah. Often it’s a little cheesy. There is a museum in Seattle—the guy that started Microsoft that isn’t Bill Gates, the other guy…

Yeah. He’s a billionaire, he loves science fiction and he loves music so he made this museum. You walk through that museum and it’s this mummified version of rock ’n’ roll. It’s a nice facility but it has this children’s museum aspect. I ask myself why music is always regimented to entertainment instead of that it’s just allowed to exist in a public space like a sculpture. It seems as if it’s rigidly interpreted in a lot of ways—at least in America. I think presenting music has a lot of catching up to do.

You hear amazing things here.

It’s kind of invasive.

You can’t really hide, that’s true. I always think about public sculpture. There’s obviously a difference between monuments and sculptures. But for a long time, monuments were the way the public expressed their history. They often have to do with war and frame the society in a weird way. So what you saw in the 20th century in public sculpture as abstraction became almost… it went from being this exciting thing that was an alien aspect of form to something that’s not going to offend anyone because it’s just a weird shape. So it got misused in a way. But you still can avoid it. You can look away. Music is kind of aggressive.

Oh, cool!

I’ve been here before once but just for a short visit. So actually tomorrow is going to be the first day I can start absorbing Tokyo. From what I’ve seen already, it’s incredible, it’s a very special place. I think generally it’s more permitted to be seduced by technology. It’s not that everyone tries to escape to the country all the time. This is reality. In the States it always feels like we try to separate nature and technology. One is work and the other is escape. Here you got this amazing combination.

No, but I actually plan to go to one.

It’s like being in a noise show.

[Smiling] It sounds like black metal.

You know, black metal is so fast that it’s sounding smooth. It’s overlapping asynchronic information. It must be amazing.

We don’t even have arcades. In the suburbs you’re lucky if you find a bowling alley that has a few games. It’s a dying culture.