User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/60-songs-that-explain-the-90s

In the ever droughtful search for podcasts, I stumbled upon 60 Songs That Explain the 90s.

108: Portishead, Glory Box

Listened to on 15-02-2024
Listen to it here

To try out this podcast, I decided to listen to the episode on Dummy semi randomly. Portishead has made some really great music, naturally, and they reside in an area of music history that I'm familiar with, but not super deep into. It is a rich area tough, so I thought this would be a good one to try out. In short: I was very positively surprised!

A meandering opening is held together by an anecdote of the narrator: while attending Portishead's 1997 concert in the Roseland Ballroom (NYC), they got so annoyed with a cheering crowdmember, that they beat them up using the saladbar nearby. The anecdote is in and out of focus during this 30 minute introduction, setting the stage of the time with related acts, the personal experiences of the narrator, and their relationship with Portishead's music. We are fed little audo snippets of the event, accompanying little snippets of the anecdote. We learn that the narrator was never there. But still, they were there and they beat up this audience member. It sounds gruesome, but it is told is such a caring manner. More and more, we learn that this all just a fiction. And then, the episode gets introduced and the intro is over.

I was in awe. The extent to which the narrator developed this fiction, only set the scene. The storytelling, masterfully interwoven with audio segments, making for a seamless* podcast experience.

In Special Issue 23, I have become increasingly interested in the power of fictionalization. Examples seen in this SI include:

Documenting through Dialogue https://www.metamute.org/sites/www.metamute.org/files/pml/irational-orgs-traum.pdf/
Map is the territory, a digital zine intended as an introduction to the command line in wizardly fashion.
The chopchop oracle: presenting a welcome message randomly selected from a pool of diverse samples.

This podcast episode reinforced this already growing interest and fascination. I guess you start to notice more examples, when you start to look for them. Having a character share their name with a book's author, for example, a decently 'common' technique in literature (and in my experience especially in Dutch literature (E.g. Blauwe Maandagen, Hedonia, ..., but also Everything Is Illuminated)). Film can do this too (e.g. Curb your Enthusiasm). For a seemingly small thing, this carries a tremendous power in engaging the consumer. What is real and what is fiction? Embracing this ambiguity primes the consumer for a real engaged connection.

103: Fugazi, Merchandise

Listened to on 17-02-2024
Listen to it here

It's August 2023 and I'm in Samara, on the phone with my good friend Mats who has been researching cyberpunk as an aesthetic, a medium and a vision. He asks: 'beschouw jij jezelf punk?'

XPUB has some very obvious connections to punk (the DIY mindset and the critical stance towards big corp), and I have found an exploration of punk movements to be very insightful for the course. This podcast episode is about Fugazi. Many anecdotes serve as a reality check, for example their policy of self-distribution, 5,- concert tickets and no merchandise (see even the bootleg library), which are policies easily translatable to publishing and design practises (e.g. self-publishing, pay-what-you-can rates, and the tension of creating cutesy stickers to make up for any missed revenue streams). But at the same time, it reminds me of the continued relevance of why these policies are in place. And while a self-published product can sometimes feel small, it is exciting and empowering that I -- a person of a different generation, a different country, a different context all araound -- can find meaning in products that found their existance in a similar way, with similar intent, 40 years later.

In the current special issue, we have taken an unexpected turn into game development. In this project, I am reminded again why this is so interesting to me. After listening to this episode and returning to class, I am for the first time trying to apply view the (indie) game industry through the lenses of these mentalities. I absolutely dare not fantasize about graduation projects yet (but there is some potential there...).