This week on Talking to Ghosts we welcome back our biggest supporters and friends, Alex Kennedy and Bruce Lord from I Die: You Die (and We Have A Technical podcast)!
This is the final episode of the Talking to Ghosts podcast. Thank you so much for listening and supporting us over the years. It meant a lot to us to be able to share our interviews and reviews with so many people.
We are off on a new adventure together, which you can find out more about at berm.world!
A *New* Program for Graphic Design is a book in three parts, based on author David Reinfurt’s eight years of teaching at Princeton University. “One semester-long course was compressed and presented [over three days] as six 45-minute lectures.” Those lectures were recorded, and in turn, became this book. A *New* Program for Graphic Design does not prescribe a way to do graphic design; rather, it gives the reader an abbreviated history, and allows them to take from this history tools and ideas they can put into use in their own design practice.
I am a self-taught designer. I do not have any formal training, aside from one semester of game development in community college, and as a result, my approach to design in the past was a sort of art-first approach. An idea comes to mind and I try to execute on that idea as well as my skills allow. This was true in both graphic design - creating album art, show posters, and band logos - as well as in my game design. This first began to change when I read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. That book had a lot of lessons for me, but the biggest was that design is as much about research as it is about making.
In A *New* Program for Graphic Design, David Reinfurt begins with typography. From Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century moveable-type, to the printing presses of Benjamin Franklin, to Beatrice Ward’s work at Monotype, we’re given a both chronological and winding history of type. The advent of reproducible prints sits side-by-side with the psychology of writing. Franklin’s work at New England’s newspapers is paired with a discussion of the power of the written word (and an anecdote about Franklin’s use of humor writing to drive a competitor into so much debt he flees the country). Eventually we get closer to the present, with the work of Bruno Munari, Muriel Cooper, the end of the printing press and the advent of desktop publishing as we now know it.
It’s in the section about Muriel Cooper that the book really takes off for me. Reading about Cooper’s approach to design, creating a hands-on, process-oriented laboratory of production techniques, was a reminder of those things I had begun to internalize from The Design of Everyday Things. Rather than thinking of design as strictly making a piece of artwork, it leads me to think again of it as a journey and process. Design becomes a loop of learning and doing and learning from doing - find a question, explore the question’s bounds, see how other people have answered the question in the past, find new potential answers for the question.
The next section of the book, “G-E-S-T-A-L-T,” continues the informal style of the first section, this time giving a history of the meeting of design and psychology. Beginning with an excerpt from Max Wertheimer’s “Investigations in Gestalt Principles,” we dive into why people perceive things the way we do. Why does flashing slightly different images one after the other convince our brain that these still images are moving? Why does our brain look at two lines of the same length and convince itself that one is longer than the other? Gestalt, in this context, tells us that it’s not the parts but the whole of the experience is what the designer should orient themselves to. The book provides examples of Gestalt in design from Max Bill, Rudolf Arnheim, Dondis A. Dondis, George Corrin, and the recurring designers Bruno Munari and Susan Kare.
The final section, “I-N-T-E-R-F-A-C-E,” deals with human interaction design. This section has several of my favorite stories in the book. One of them, the story of the Olivetti typewriter. The creator of this typewriter, Camillo Olivetti, is described as feeling a strong responsibility to the area in which a business operates, and wanted to make a machine that felt more human to use. The book describes his factory as being built expressly to make the workers more comfortable, with large windows facing the Alps. His son, Adriano, was convinced that machines and humans were at odds, and only through design could their relationship be reconciled. The photographs of the machines, with their shells designed by artists, are beautiful, and the ethos professes the need for designers to be thinking of the societal impact of the work they do. Design, the book argues, should not just be oriented towards commercial success, but towards societal good.
Tetracono animated 480p from Dexter Sinister on Vimeo.
Two stories in the final section really reinforce how important research is as the first step of the design process. In the story of the Tetracono, the author talks about his process hunting down, photographing and researching the object, detailing its history and how it fit in with the work Munari was doing with Danese Milano, a company that was concerned with selling art objects as much as they were with home goods.
In another story, the author details his work on the user interface for the Metrocard vending machine that would replace tokens in the New York Subway. Reinfurt shows how you start with a design question (how do we make buying Metrocard credits as fast and intuitive as buying tokens) and through research, testing, redesigning, and retesting, you can end up with something that has endured for 20 years.
To me, research is easily the most important concept the book touches on over and over, the thing that ties all design practice together. For any designer who is, like me, without any formal design training, A *New* Program for Graphic Design functions as a fantastic survey of design’s history, and what goes into great design. The next time I’m working on a project I know I’ll be thinking about this book and its lessons before I rush pen to paper.
A *New* Program for Graphic Design is written by David Reinfurt and published by Inventory Press and Distributed Art Publishers. You can buy it directly from the publisher, or whichever local independent bookstore near you sells books about design.
This week on the podcast we talk to author, journalist, and DJ Emilly Prado. We chat about her new book, "Funeral For Flaca," which is out now from Future Tense Books.
To find out more about Emilly's work, please visit her official website.
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
As a reminder, the next episode will be our last episode of the podcast. We're starting a contemporary arts magazine called Berm in 2022. To find out more about Berm, and to get updates on it's release, check out the Berm website.
Language Lessons is a film about friendship and the kindness of strangers when you need them most. It’s a story about grief, and how it can sometimes be embarrassing, or mean, or make you feel like everything is suddenly out of place.
The movie begins with Cariño, played by Natalie Morales, who is also the co-writer and director, appearing on a video call screen, waiting for her student to arrive. She says hello to an empty, but large, living room. From the furthest point on the frame, which we discover is the bedroom, Adam, played by Mark Duplas, emerges. Confused, he asks “Why are you in my house?” She lets him know that his husband, who is off screen, has paid for 100 Spanish language lessons and that they are to meet every week. They immediately begin to speak in a kind of stuttered, mostly-right Spanish, thanks to Adam’s conversational Spanish classes in high school. But he says his morning routine is important to him, so they move to the pool, where he plunges back and forth from the cold water side to the hot tub. They begin to speak; they get to know each other.
Two people find themselves in a peculiar situation, and then they talk a lot about interesting things. This is the Duplass Brothers way. In Creep, someone responds to a weird ad to hang out with a weird guy, then they talk a lot until conflict happens; in Blue Jay, two old lovers bump into each other in the grocery store of their hometown, then they talk a lot until conflict happens; and in Paddleton, the last movie I saw by Mark Duplass, two neighbors connect, they talk a lot, then something very sad happens for a long time. So I was primed, in a way, when things turned in Language Lessons.
The film is divided into titled lessons where the Spanish language word and pronunciation are set opposite the English word. In the second lesson, which is titled “Comprensión/Comprehension,” Cariño is having a hard time reaching Adam. She calls but he doesn’t answer. She leaves a voicemail. She calls again and he answers this time, but is extremely despondent. In bed, in a dark room, he looks like he’s been through an emotional hell - because he has. His husband has died the night before in a sudden vehicle accident, which he tells Cariño as part of their conversational “lesson.” The playful, strange situation of the first lesson is suddenly behind us. It’s dark and the world is real.
Language Lessons is beautifully acted. Natalie Morales, who co-wrote the movie with Mark, is incredible. Cariño is caring and reserved. She’s embarrassed by some of the situations she finds herself in, but she’s also defensive when Adam tries to help. Making a movie over video calls is challenging. The emotions are hard to portray, the timing is weird. Glitches in the video and audio were left in the film intentionally. But Morales’ performance easily cuts through. There is a scene in the middle of the movie where Cariño calls Adam drunk, at 2:30 in the morning his time. She’s just found out it’s his birthday thanks to some light internet stalking, so she wants to call and sing him happy birthday in Spanish, as a lesson. She’s jubilant in a way we haven’t really seen her in the film. She’s drunk, obviously. But she’s funny and assertive. She’s willing to open up to Adam about her life.
Then, the next day, she dodges Adam’s call. She’s embarrassed. We see her rehearse several video messages to send to him. She tries to tell him she can’t continue their lessons. Something personal has come up and she has to postpone, or maybe refund. But we don’t see the one she sends. He returns voicemails, but there’s no response from Cariño, which puts him at a loss because he thought they were finally able to say the things they wanted to say to each other about friendship.
What Natalie Morales brings to the film as a director is more than her own character depth. The film is expertly paced. From platonic rom-com, to heavy drama, the film flies by effortlessly at one hour and thirty minutes. Plan B, which was her directorial debut, felt very similar despite being much more of a buddy comedy. Although she did not write Plan B, I find it interesting that both films revolve around a platonic, but still almost romantic relationship between two friends. While this may be entirely coincidental, the ability to navigate emotionally deep, authentic friendships can be difficult, especially when there are so many tropes around it in media history, but in both films Morales nails it.
Often media made during the COVID-19 pandemic feels too close or too soon to me, as if I have not accurately prepared myself to be mirrored by the creators I love. Going into Language Lessons, I was nervous about having to see people talk only through video call. But by the end of the film, I was so taken by the performances and the writing that I stopped paying attention to how the film was presented because the story was so strong. The characters were so realized and pure that it didn’t matter how or where or when they were presented. There is no romantic story at the heart of Language Lesson, only the love of new friendship, and that makes it more unique than the format.
Language Lessons is available for rent or purchase on VOD services.
This week on the podcast we talk to author and illustrator Sloane Leong about her new graphic novel Graveneye. We talked about working with Anna Bowles on the art for Graveneye, the process of pitching comics, and how to abstract a story by changing up the narrator.
Graveneye is out now from TKO Studios. You can find more of Sloane's work on her official website, or check out Salt & Honey podcast, which is now up on Youtube.
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
A Tear In The Fabric Of Life is the latest release from Knocked Loose, a hardcore band from northern Kentucky. What started as an attempt to create something less personal and more artistic ended up a vehicle to work through feelings of grief and self-doubt. A fictional narrative is woven through the six tracks of the EP, not just through the lyrics but also through the musical choices the band makes.
The first track, “Where Light Divides The Holler,” begins the story of a car accident, one that kills the narrator’s partner, leaving them soaking on the side of the ride, alone. The song begins with a car starting, a radio, then, a collision of guitars, drums, and screaming breaks through. As the narrator crawls from the river, so does the music - the rhythm slows to a half-time breakdown, again mimicking the narrative moment.
In a genre not known for subtlety, Knocked Loose uses the brutality of their sound to a really fantastic effect. As the narrator is “crushed by the weight of terror,” the listener is subjected to equally crushing, drop tuned guitars, palm-muted and grinding away. In the later songs, as the narrative becomes more about the grief, confusion, and pain of the narrator, these feelings are really effectively conveyed within the conventions of the genre. For the melodies in “Forced To Stay,” the band uses a guitar tone that wouldn’t be out of place for a band like The Deftones; this tone really helps bring the grief of a burial to the forefront. “Contorted in the Faille” utilizes a common-in-the-genre sort of circular riff to mimic confusion and a self-destructive inebriation. I can’t think of another hardcore album that is constructed in this way, and I think it speaks to the more art-focused approach to the release.
Setting aside the artistic choices Knocked Loose made to communicate the narrative of the EP, A Tear in The Fabric Of Life is, for lack of a better phrase, fully sick. The pacing of the tracks is excellent - the band knows when to pick up the speed and when to drop into brutal half- and quarter-time breakdowns. Front to back, the tone of the guitars is fantastic; whether it’s drop tuned, palm muted grinding riffs, or dissonant harmonic picking, everything feels balanced to create as brutal and clear a sound as possible. Nothing gets lost in the ordered chaos of the riffs. I can’t listen to the EP without getting out of my chair and picking up some nickels, wearing a face like I just smelled the most foul scent of my life.
A Tear In The Fabric Of Life is out now, available from Pure Noise or through Bandcamp.
On April 14, 2014 we put out our first episode of Talking To Ghosts called "Formal Introductions." At the time, we envisioned it as a way to highlight goth and industrial musicians we were excited about. Over the years we branched out, interviewing creatives from all sorts of disciplines: illustrators, writers, game designers, artists, and, of course, more musicians.
After seven and a half years, episode 200 will be the last episode of the podcast. It's be a fantastic ride, and we've had the opportunity to meet with and give a platform to so many interesting creatives. Now, we've decided we want to create a new platform for the artists and creators we love.
We're starting Berm, a magazine that aims to provide a platform for artists, writers, and creators with broad and diverse views of contemporary art and design.
We want to thank you for coming with us on this podcasting journey over the last several years. We hope that you'll continue to come along with us as we set out on this new adventure. You can sign up for updates to be notified by visiting our website berm.world
Your ghosts,
Michael Kurt & Wesley Mueller
This week on the Talking to Ghosts podcast, we have Venezuelan-American artist Lala Drona. Through painting, video, and performance art, Lala's work addresses digital spaces and the female gaze. We talked about her video The Box, how women's bodies are used as currency on the internet, and how to be patient with yourself.
There is a CONTENT WARNING for this episode - from 44:45-45:15 there is discussion of incest and rape in a conversation about feminism in France. It is brief and does not carry on through the rest of the conversation.
The best place to check out Lala's work is on her official website.
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
Sally Rooney is a novelist I found through the Hulu adaptation of her book Normal People. The dour, smart, university-age protagonists swept me into a world of romance, sexuality, and conversations with friends at parties held in what can only be described as the most beautiful Irish apartments and countryside houses - all of which had been pretty well hampered by the beginning of what would be a still ongoing global pandemic. I tried to listen to her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, through the library’s audiobook system, but I wasn’t ready. The characters were too close to those in Normal People. This was not a problem that actually existed between the two novels, which were released a year apart, but something that had to do with my own reading habits, which would take almost a year to return to normal.
When Beautiful World, Where Are You? was announced, I quickly pre-ordered it without checking what I would be in store for many months later. The cover design, which is a wonderful light blue with swipes of yellow images and black lettering, was enough. When it arrived, I was bouncing between books I didn’t really enjoy my time with. Most of my pandemic reading had been spent diving into the large omnibuses of Goodnight Punpun and Planetes - something that would slowly propel me back into novels and my love for reading prose. I was ready for the drama and awkward realities of modern people. I was ready for Sally Rooney.
Beautiful World, Rooney’s third novel, advances the age of it’s protagonists to around thirty, which is something I was not expecting and became a little frightening. People my age, I thought, smart and out in the world at parties, having sex, meeting each other. Written over many years, the novel takes on the lurid isolation of a small town cast. Even in Dublin, where half the characters spend the majority of the novel, the scenes are set inside of apartments or at the tail ends of small gatherings; or on the bus home, stopping suddenly to visit someone who comforts them (even if it might be a little awkward and weird); or visiting with a new friend’s roommates and meeting their dog. These are the kinds of scenes on which Rooney sets her cast.
Structured as a mixed epistolary novel - letters between the two main protagonists Alice and Eileen, which are then interspersed with sections of third-person prose - Beautiful World tells the story of two relationships. Alice, who is a famous author, has moved away to the countryside in Ireland after a psychiatric episode (caused in part by her new found fame). After deciding to meet someone new in town through Tinder, she begins an awkward and, at times, argumentative relationship with a handsome, often troubled warehouse worker named Felix. Eileen, who roomed with Alice in University and remains a close friend, tires of her mundane job at a literary magazine in Dublin and begins to spiral back into the arms of a childhood crush, Simon, who she has been on-again-off-again with for most of her life.
There is a sense, at times, which is close to how I often feel, that the characters are almost upset to have to know and repeat the things people approaching “adulthood” are want to talk about: the climate, generational progress, the standards of beauty and love and culture all around them. An element of fantasy comes through in the way Alice and Eileen exchange multi-page emails about Christianity and the history of the written word. And yet (even though I’ve never sent an email longer than a few paragraphs, let alone pages), their emails are exciting to read, and they’re revealing, and hurtful sometimes in the way they are interrupted by the trivial nature of love and life. The insecurity about the kind of love you don’t want to let yourself be swept away by because it feels so Hollywood, or novel, or childish, but you do anyway, all gets shoehorned in at the end of a long email.
This is the strength of Sally Rooney: she makes you believe there are these kinds of friendships in the world still, where people reach across a three hour divide to tell each other about how they are suddenly rethinking everything they’ve done in their lives because a childhood crush has resurfaced (seemingly endlessly, for the forth, or maybe fifth time). And he’s Christian, in 2020! Catholic, at that!
After finishing the novel, I thought the sexual situations were different when compared to Normal People. With some distance it seems like they serve a similar purpose, but were presented differently. Perhaps with the age difference between the narrators there became a certain understanding about the comfort or the need for sex to fill a certain emotional aspect of a relationship. In Normal People, it felt to me like sex was a means to an end - a way of getting close to someone by using your body as collatoral. The immediacy of sex was a device of confrontation and mutual avoidance when it came to having to talk about how the characters felt about one another. Whereas, in Beautiful World, I felt like the sex, while serving a similar need for comfort and closeness, was a way to bring an emotion to the surface. To share yourself with someone physically in order to show you have a desire to be near them. In the end, these are the same when it comes to closeness, but feel different. The maturity of a relationship that is burning to be more physically intimate versus using their bodies as a weapon (even if the purpose of that weapon is to get closer to each other). This could also be due to having only seen the mini-series version of Normal People, where the nudity is imagery to confront as opposed to words within a larger narrative context.
It’s strange to read a novel about characters your own age, especially during a time of such unnatural isolation and distance. At the end of the novel, the characters write to each other from inside of the pandemic isolation, which feels both too soon to read about and also strikingly too late. Voyeuristically, I want them to succeed in their new entrapments. I want them to thrive in all the ways we all thought we would thrive when the idea was that it would only be a few more months. Pragmatically, pessimistically, as the second anniversary of pandemic isolation looms nearer and nearer, I fear for my new fictional friends and lovers. I hope they make it together.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a wonderful portrait of what it is to be thirty-something. Through success and failure and milieu, Rooney finds a way to make an extremely successful author relatable to her new warehouse-working love interest. Through conflict and misunderstanding, through personal history and confession, and the unending obligations of being employed and living in the world, the characters become real for what I hope will be a wide range of readers.
Beautiful World, Where Are You? is out now in hardcover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This week on the Talking to Ghosts podcast we have doom metal duo (debateably a 9-piece, actually) Vile Creature! We were excited to talk to them after the recent release of their Kitty "Paperdoll" cover for The Flenser Nu Metal compilation, which is available now for digital purchase or as part of The Flenser's Series 3 subscription.
Vile Creature is a great band with great folks. Michael was made to watch The Pagemaster film, we performed a focus group regarding the Juicy Mosh Shorts, and talked a lot about how to make time for creativity while also running a business.
For more information about Vile Creature, check out thier official website. Their newest full length, "Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!" is available via their Bandcamp.
Talking to Ghosts is recorded and produced by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
Sable is a game that sent me back and forth, both in expectations in the lead up to its release, and in playing it. For a long time, GIFs of Sable would come across my timeline, and I’d be amazed by how good the Moebius-inspired art looked. It was hard to not be excited by something so beautiful. Then, years after GIFs first started showing up, we finally had some gameplay demos. This was, for me and some other game designer friends, the first sign of trouble for the game. Built on exploration, shooting across a desert landscape on a hoverbike, this core mechanic looked clunky and floaty. The game was still beautiful, but watching it in action was underwhelming. But demos are demos, and judgment has to be reserved for actually playing the game itself.
Screenshot from the game Sable, it shows a masked person riding a hoverbike across a desert landscape. In the background is a brick tower with a domed top, and campfire smoke snaking up to the sky.
When I started playing Sable, my first impressions were good. The game was, of course, beautiful visually - little details in the architecture and the design of the characters all fit together to construct a world that feels fully thought out. The opening platforming section (platforming being the other core mechanic of the game) felt good. This good impression lasted for about half an hour. Once I was let loose on the world, my fears were confirmed - the bike did feel clunky, constantly being spun out on little bits of geometry, and floated in a way that felt disconnected from the world around it. In addition, in the starting area, points of interest are set so far apart that most of the time spent here was experienced through this slightly irritating bike.
Then I started running into bugs. On more than one occasion, the controls just stopped working and I had to save and quit to get the controls back. One of these occasions happened during a particularly arduous climb, and sent me falling all the way back down to the ground to start again. Then, after I finished a long climbing section, I went in search of my bike to find it missing. I stood on the map marker looking around, but it was nowhere to be seen. I restarted the game, hoping it would pop back into existence, only to find it was still gone. At this point I seriously considered just giving up on Sable.
There was no way I was going to play through the incredibly tedious 2 hours I just went through again to get back to this point. On a whim, I pressed the A button hovering over a map marker on a previously visited location and discovered the game had a fast travel mechanic. I audibly groaned at how much time I had spent just holding the right trigger, zipping through empty desert, because the game had not told me about this feature. I hit the fast travel button, and as I expected, my bike reappeared next to me when I arrived at my destination. I decided I would continue on.
After some more exploring, I ended up in the city of Eccria. This is probably 3 or 4 hours into a game that, according to HowLongToBeat, is an average of 6-8 hours long. It’s also when I started to enjoy the game. Eccria is beautifully designed. There’s lovely little nooks and crannies, filled with details that make it seem like a place that was actually lived in. There is, unfortunately, not a lot of people filling out these little spaces, but it still is a more dense hub of things to do than most of the game up to this point. Where most of the quests in the early game sent me 5-10 minutes across some dunes to pick something up or drop it off, Eccria offered several quests that involved exploring the city, talking to people, investigating, and learning more about the world.
Screenshot from the game Sable. It shows a tall, broken stone bridge, with two enormous green statues of soldiers. One soldier trying to climb the face of the bridge, and the top soldier preparing to strike.
In the end, my feelings about Sable are complicated. While the first half was tedious and frustrating, I legitimately enjoyed the back half of the game. The writing was great - there was nice characterization of the people you met in the world, a feat considering how short many of the interactions were. The way the Sable’s words were delivered through their thoughts, and not through dialogue, worked well to show how they were thinking and interacting with the world they were exploring. The art, of course, was beautiful, and when you came across a vista like the Bridge of the Betrayed it was legitimately breathtaking. And of course the sound track, written by Japanese Breakfast, was fantastic. Can I recommend playing Sable? I’m not sure if I can. I don’t know if the tedium was worth getting through to the end, and that’s disappointing for a game that I really wanted to love.
Sable, the first game from Shedworks, is available on consoles and Steam.
This week on Talking to Ghosts podcast we have Kate Bingaman-Burt, who is an illustrator, professor of graphic design, and zine library archivist here in Portland, Oregon. Kate founded and operates the print space Outlet, where she provides great workshops on risoprinting, zine-making, and the business of art.
We had a great time talking about transitioning to teaching virtually and how the PSU staff had to come together pretty quickly to adapt to the pandemic shutdown. We also talked about the design-world changes in Portland, Sonic Ocean Breeze, and how zines have become accessible ways for people to get their work out there!
You can find more information about all the work Kate does at Outletpdx.com
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
Celestial Blues does a lot more work than is readily available on the surface. It is immediately gratifying - the heavy moments are really heavy, catchy riffs and choruses drive the tracks, and the lyrics are seductive: “my name is Lucifer, nice to meet you.” At the same time, the distorted or loud moments never feel discordant, or like a surprise, because they map so cleanly to the emotional highs and lows of the song’s (and the album’s) structure. The characteristically doubled vocal technique makes the words both clear and mysterious in places, which sometimes feel like confessions in passing, especially as the music overwhelms them, or when words drop from stanzas as the spoken section is broken with emotion.
When I returned to 2017’s Created In The Image Of Suffering, I was surprised to find a sound palette that felt similar to Celestial Blues. There is a mixture of grunge-sounding distortion and heavy-fuzz sludginess that has been carried through all of King Woman’s releases, but now on tracks like “Boghz” are used as an emotional punch to the gut, whereas on many tracks from Created In The Image of Suffering, the fuzzy sound design was the primary element. It started songs and ended them - the emotional rise and fall of a track was much more dependent on the power of the vocals and the doomy quality to the guitar riffs. A reserve was taken when writing Celestial Blues, as if each element were put through more scrutiny before placed in a track, and the tracks themselves were arranged and rearranged until the entire runtime created a clear emotional experience.
In an interview with New Noise Magazine, Kris said:
“I was very angry in Doubt and Created in The Image of Suffering, and just working through a lot. With this, I was more interested in the character, because I wanted to tell more of their stories in a way, but also tie it in with my own personal experiences.”
This is most present on the track “Golgatha,” which starts in the way many of the songs start - a clean, but reverberated guitar, and a vocal section. In this case though, the lyrics will repeat and grow, giving the song a slowly escalating effect. “It never ends,” Kris speaks softly (later doubled, later with an elevated harmony, later against a wall of guitar distortion and cymbals, then with a scream behind it), “no, it never ends, the snake eats its tail and we return again to this hell.” The beat intensifies. More lyrics get added to the mantra, which continues to repeat without losing one ounce of emotional power. Then, when the tension is high and the mantra has lulled you along with the character, the guitars kick in and it’s huge. Big riffs. “This hell / this hell / I’ll return again with these scars, my friend / No, it never ends.”
It encapsulates what it’s like to be alive. Even when violins enter and the drums break down, releasing the tension and creating a moment of respite from the feeling of endless misery, the mantra has no other place to go but back into the rotation of the song. It slows down, it gets quieter, and the words fade with the rest of the song. Hell is the words that repeat in our heads and, like the emotional arc of this track, we may never return to that one loud moment in our lives, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away.
As a quick aside: as much as this album maps to the hopelessness of the last few years for me, it isn’t a pandemic record. In an interview with Beyond The Boy’s Club, Kris said:
“I wrote this record between projects and recorded it in December of 2019 [...] It’s been done for a while. I was taking my time with releasing, and I wasn’t in the mood to rush it. I took my time with the video and photos and just said, ‘I’m going to take my time.’”
The video she’s talking about, released alongside the single “Morning Star,” is a magical 360-single-shot with Kris at the center as the eponymous Morning Star. Directed by Muted Widows, and expertly staged, the video was well worth taking the time on. Of all the music videos I’ve seen this year, this was the most compelling. It encapsulated so much of what drew me to Kris’s performance style, but it also brought out a thriving character. Dancing, smoking, with slick-backed hair, Lucifer appears to bring you their message. About “Morning Star,” Kris said:
“We were told that Lucifer was so bad and evil, but I feel like oftentimes the people who are portrayed as bad guys in different stories or the news are not what they’re perceived to be, so I wanted to flip it on its head and make it something interesting. So, it’s Lucifer’s way of defending himself.”
The only track I don’t like on the album, which is purely personal taste and not at all a knock on the album, is “Psychic Wound,” which I feel is out of place in the scale and emotionality of the rest of the album. The psych elements are too far forward in the mix compared to the rest of the album. But psych-inspired music, in general, is not something I often listen to. At the third-to-last slot on the album, it doesn’t bother me. The front half is so, so strong, that it doesn’t affect my read on the album at all. “Ruse” comes on right after and I forget all about it. So, your mileage may vary.
Celestial Blues ends with “Paradise Lost,” which is a quiet and heartfelt song. I try to pay attention to the lyrics, which are often doubled and sometimes whispered, because they feel like deep wells of personal reflection. But all I can ever take away is the final line “it’s just the saddest story,” which comes as the final transition in the song, and the album. The words are devastating. As a reflection of the characters we’ve met on the album this line brings an end to the transformation of a life’s story - at least for now.
While digging into the different interviews, lyrics, and music videos for this album, it is clear that there is so much more context to the album than is immediately available on the surface. It rewards passive listeners, but also those who like to dig and find meaning in the additional content. I’m excited for people to find this record, and later, when it is safe, to see it played live, because I feel like it will be an all-time favorite in many circles. There’s so much to revisit.
Celestial Blues is the second full-length album from King Woman. Available now from Relapse Records.
This week on the show we have Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, who is a multi-spirited Nigerian-American poet, curator, and performance artist whose work is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theory. We spoke to Jaamil about using the pandemic as a time to slow down, turning from the investigation of Black Suffering to Black Joy, and their upcoming projects: Syllabus For Black Love and Black Body Amnesia.
Jaamil's work is best found on their website or, for more frequent updates, his Instagram.
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
The first time I played a 4X game was at a cousin’s house. They had Civilization 2 on their family computer, and after a couple turns I was completely enamored with it. When I got home, I had to get it for myself and put in hours and hours of playtime. As time went on, I played Alpha Centauri, then Civilization 3, 5, and 6. Across the games, I’ve probably sunk close to 1,000 hours into the turn-based strategy series.
Over the years, I’ve tried a number of other 4X games and nothing really captured me like Civilization. I found Crusader Kings and Stellaris interesting, but the level of depth and complication was more than I usually wanted from my 4X sessions. Total War: Shogun captured me for a while, but didn’t pull me into the Total War series the way I had been pulled into Civilization. Humankind is the first time I’ve honestly been able to say a game does everything I want a 4X to do, and it does it better than Civilization in every instance I’ve encountered.
Humankind starts you off in the Neolithic period. Unlike Civilization, where you feel rushed to start your first city as fast as possible, Humankind encourages you to move around and take in your surroundings a bit. You start with a single unit and, by encountering special food tiles or hunting deer and mammoths, can create new units from your existing one. This lets you explore further and wider before settling down. It’s completely feasible to make it all the way to the ancient era before you even put down an Outpost, the precursor settlement that can eventually become a city.
Screenshot from Humankind shows a tribe unit on a cliff, overlooking a forest and the ocean, with mammoths, deer, and bears roaming the map. Source: Amplitude
Like other 4X games, choosing where you’re going to start is a matter of finding a good balance of food and industry resources. One nice change from Civilization is the use of terrain - where Civilization does have some defensive bonuses from things like hills and forests, Humankind has several different heights of terrain, which create really interesting and dynamic battles.
The battles are a place where the Humankind approach really shines. When you start a battle against another unit (or set of units), you have two options, a manual battle or an automatic resolution. If you choose to go with the manual battle, you enter a little mini tactical battle round. You can deploy your units across the terrain, taking advantage of high ground and mobility bonuses to make battles where you’re theoretically weaker into more even affairs. Unlike in Civilization, where you may take several full game terms to resolve a battle between several units, Humankind let’s you finish many fights within a single turn of the game by breaking the battle out into this tactical system.
One of my favorite systems in Humankind is the ideology system. Throughout the game you’re presented with random events asking you to make choices for your people. The way you answer these questions moves your civilization left or right on four different ideological spectrums - collectivism versus individualism, liberty versus authority, tradition versus progress, and world versus homeland. Rather than preset archetypes like Civilization uses, this system creates a more organic way for AI civilizations, or other players if you’re playing online, to build relationships with you. If you’re more authoritarian, liberty-focused empires will like you less; if you’re more collectivist, individualist empires will be more antagonistic. The more extreme the ideological differences, the more likely you are to be in conflict with the other empires.
The key system that really sets Humankind apart is the culture system. Rather than selecting a leader and being locked into their bonuses and weaknesses for the rest of the game, each time you change eras (from neolithic to ancient to classical and so on), you are given the opportunity to change cultures. Maybe you started with a money focused culture like the Egyptians but have found yourself in conflict with one of your neighbors. When you move up to the classical period you may choose to switch to a more combat focused culture like the Huns. This really helps the game feel more fluid, and resolves the problem of needing to pick a single way to play on turn one and grind that style out for several hundred turns, regardless of how circumstances change over the game.
Screenshot from the game Humankind, it shows a carousel interface with Teutons, Khmer, English, Mongols, and Umayyads cultures. Source: Amplitude
There are so many places like this where Humankind takes an idea or system from Civilization and fleshes it out or makes it feel better. The game is full of small quality of life improvements (like the battle system) that you feel every single turn. More than 20 hours in and I’m constantly marvelling at how the game continues to flow along without the sort of slumps and slogs of mid- and late-game Civilization. While it’s not breaking any extraordinary new ground for the genre, it is so well refined that it feels almost revelatory in comparison to other 4X games.
As a final thought on Humankind, I would like to note that the game does not seem to grapple significantly with the problems intrinsic to the genre. 4X (which stands for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) is founded in power fantasies of settler-colonialism. While Humankind does eliminate the barbarians of Civilization in favor of peaceful and aggressive animals, and later independent nations you can build actual relationships with, the game is still focused on the expansion of empires, and, as such, conquering, assimilating, or exterminating at least some of your neighbors is a likely consequence. In my experience so far, it is easier to avoid war with your neighbors than in games like Civilization or Crusader Kings, but not to the degree where I can say it is discouraged or unrewarded. I would love to see a large-scale strategy game grapple with this part of the genre, but Humankind is not that game.
Humankind was released in August 2021 by Amplitude and Sega, and you can find it on Xbox Games Pass, Steam, Epic, and Stadia.
This week on Talking to Ghosts we are knocking out a bunch of the reviews we wish we had time to write. 2021 has been a banger of a year for content so far, so we'd thought we'd spend some time going through some of our favorites.
Wes reviewed:
Mobile Suite Gundam: The Origin / Char's Counterattack/ Hathaway
Lingua Ignota's "Sinner Get Ready"
Michael Reviewed:
Hante.'s "Morning Tsunami"
youryoungbody's "eXcess"
Racoon City's "For Nobody, Nowhere"
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more catchy and disgustingly composed collection of tracks in my life. Every track on goddexx is so wet and chaotic and, yet, there are parts of Galen Tipton’s songs that get stuck in my head for days. Fragments of tracks pass through whatever else I might be listening to; a gross glittering oil seeps into my resting brain waves to the point that I have no choice but to throw on the goddexx (deluxe edition) for the second or third time that day. Like Lauren Bousfield’s Palimpsest, the crashing electronic mess becomes a rhythmic meditation that I can lose myself in - voices on top of other voices, raised a few octaves, crushed and spit back out, too fast to comprehend; a music box chimes, and brings me back to clarity; a symphony of surreal choirs and flutes and strings lifts everything up, higher than you thought was even possible, always adding more layers. But then it breaks down and the chaos of voices stabilizes into deep base, and space, and I suddenly realize I’ve been banging my head hard enough to make myself dizzy. That’s what it’s like to listen to Galen Tipton.
The artwork for goddexx, which is how I found the album in the first place, is wild. It reminds me of the A.I. generated artwork that was being passed around for a while on Twitter, where the AI was fed a number of famous paintings, took them in, processed them all at once, and then created a gross and unsettling image - not quite right, not quite something tangible, but still somehow packed with the emotion of all the great source material. By Sam Rolfes, the goddexx cover is an ethereal being against a pastel cloudscape. Grey and green and pink and black, the body of the being is graceful (but also, in some ways, coming apart). It holds out in front of it a smaller, slightly more recognizable form, which has a pink bow and is heavily caked in makeup. As if presenting a child as it’s own face, as part of itself, but still holding the thing at a distance. There are swords, and a bulbous clown nose, and stubby fingers on swollen ball-hands. But it’s pastel. It’s shiny, in places. Why does it feel so gross?
While pitching this EP to a friend recently, I said that the cover art is an emotional replica of the music. It’s chaotic and beautiful and disturbing and otherworldly. It’s part rave and part glitch and part symphonic grace. The image is heavy with low frequency, but at the same time there’s a computer music quality to the visual and sonic atmosphere. The stereo mix is intoxicating. Every new track expands out and pulls in, like a low resolution screensaver of the ocean, jittering all around you. It’s transporting.
With seven original tracks and three remixes, the deluxe edition is just long enough to feel like a complete journey. The sound design is deeply consistent. For something so chaotic, it’s a little surprising how the tone of the original tracks flow so well into each other and still, somehow, remain distinct. I could see how this album would be grating for some people (there’s a lot of uncomfortable glitching), but for me the tonal consistency and the repetition of distinct elements (like the music box chimes or the flutes) tether the whole thing to a world designed solely for goddexx. The only song that takes me out of the flow slightly is “pixie ring,” which features Diana Starshine, N. Hell, and Junior Astronaut, because it has a very clear vocal section. For the first time, after about 20 minutes of highly processed, stuttered vocal segments, a voice appears. Upon multiple listens, though, this break is kind of welcome. It signals its own movement: we’re getting closer to the end. “elf fetish,” which is the next (and final) original track, feels more somber because of this change, where something like “courageous grieving” or “girl dick” would have felt too abrasive or chaotic to end on.
For example, the Seth Graham remix of “girl dick” takes an atmospheric and moody approach to the otherwise very rhythmic and dramatic song - turning it into something closer to a soundtrack - wherein the samples are tied to an emotional movement rather than a driving rhythm. While these re-interpretations are interesting, and shine light on the depth and versatility of the sound design that went into goddexx, it is very clear that the EP came to an end when “elf fetish” was finished.
In an interview with Paste Magazine, Tipton said writing goddexx “was imagining myself as this type of [shonen anime/manga] character, able to take on anything from internal struggles to social constructs that want me and others like me dead.” I feel this imbues the sound design with triumphant defiance. Many times throughout the album, I felt like a struggle was finally breaking into something comprehendible, something safer, and lighter, and more understandable. To read that this EP was written in a time of great stress in Tipton’s life is unfortunate, and something I wish she never had to experience. But the emotion comes through. It bleeds pink and purple and orange and dark heavy liquid onto the catchy, rave-like elements and makes them punch harder. Often when I think of cathartic music, my mind immediately gravitates towards the raw, traditionally heavy, guitar-based, drop-A-tuned metal. Or sad shit like Lingua Ignota or Miserable or Our Lady. But goddexx fits this catharsis to its own tuning. A brighter and catchier mess. “That sometime[s] healing is ugly and can happen at a much slower pace than you want,” Tipton says, when asked what people should take away from this release. “That it's just as important to [lose] yourself and mosh in the club as it is to dance.”
Galen Tipton has been releasing music, at least on Bandcamp, since 2016. goddexx, for my money, is her best work to date and is on heavy rotation for all the reasons I’ve mentioned in this review. The tonal consistency and the sound design is just on a different level. It’s so good. She also releases music under the moniker Recovery Girl. goddexx (deluxe edition) is available now through unseelie records.
This week on Talking to Ghosts we are re-running our 2019 interview with Vancouver techno-EBM friends Sigsaly! Since we spoke with them, they have released a single and new record both called Lasting Effects, which you can pick up on their bandcamp. We talked with Sigsaly about performing as Koban and the switch to a more minimal techno/ebm vibe, playing the community center in high school, and finding a new and exciting audience.
Talking to ghosts is recorded and produced by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
Direct Download.
Yakuza: Like A Dragon is the 8th game in the Yakuza series. While the last 7 Yakuza games (and the spin-off game Judgment) have been brawlers, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has gone in a new direction with Like A Dragon, creating a fantastic and engaging JRPG, filled with all the heart the Yakuza series is known for.
Once I dove into Yakuza 0, I immediately fell in love with the series. After I finished 0, I jumped straight into Yakuza Kiwami (a remake of the original game), then on the recommendation of a friend I skipped forward to Yakuza 6 and Like A Dragon.
Like A Dragon moves away from the series’ enduring long running protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, and introduces Ichiban Kasuga, a young Tojo yakuza in the Arakawa Family. Kasuaga was born in a bathhouse and raised without ever knowing his parents. A troublemaker, his life was saved as teen by Masumi Arakawa, the clan’s patriarch. This brought Kasuga into the yakuza, and in time Arakawa became something of a father figure to him.
When a shooting threatens the Arakawa Family, Kasuga is asked to take the fall in the place of his captain. After spending 18 years in prison to protect his clan, Kasuga is betrayed by his patriarch and left for dead in Isezaki Ijincho. Unlike previous games, which focused on a conflict between the Tojo and Omi Alliance in Kamarucho, most of Like A Dragon focuses on the conflicts of this new setting, and a brittle truce between the competing criminal organizations that call it home.
Despite the change in setting and genre, a lot of the mainstays of the Yakuza series appear in Like A Dragon. One of the most endearing parts of the series are the many “sub-stories,” side quests that range from goofy to dramatic to horny to heartbreaking. These side stories are what gives Yakuza its unique feeling. One moment you might be helping a yakuza gang that loves dressing as babies, the next you might be helping a little girl raise money for her brother’s life saving surgery. Seeing how your character reacts to these different stories, always eager to help people in need, really gives him life and shows you the type of person he is.
Because of the change in main mechanic from brawler to JRPG, there are some interesting new features as well. As you move through the game, you recruit new characters to be a part of your party. Each of these characters has a unique story associated with them, with story beats gated behind a relationship meter. Eating at restaurants, playing minigames, and winning battles increases these relationship meters and allows you to progress through their individual stories and unlock unique and powerful battle abilities. These relationship stories help not just to show who your party is, but who Kasuga is as he reacts to their troubles.
The combat itself is fairly standard JRPG turn-based combat. There’s an auto-mode if you don’t feel like inputting commands, but in either manual or auto mode the game keeps you active with inputs for skill attacks, and the ability to reduce damage by making inputs when being attacked. While the combat in many JRPGs lately has left me feeling bored and impatient, I think this more active turn-based combat kept Like A Dragon engaging.
However, there were a few points in the game that had me feeling a little less than enthusiastic about playing. At a couple points, you have to make your way through “dungeons” (levels full of enemies where you can’t save except at checkpoints). These dungeons were visually uninteresting and often felt like filler. I would have much rather fought through another thoughtfully designed building or arena rather than slog my way through twisting identical concrete hallways.
There’s also a major boss fight near the end of the game where the boss has a one-hit KO move, and if he uses it on Kasuga it’s an instant game over. This led me to discover that the way to avoid this is to have leveled a specific job for Kasuga to unlock a character ability that prevents one-hit KOs. Learning this, I ended up having to back out of the mission to a previous save (which meant I would later have to fight my way all the way back up to the boss), then grind for hours to get this ability so I could finish the game. The most efficient way to grind, unfortunately, was in the uninteresting dungeons. If it hadn’t been so close to the end of the game, I may have taken a break from the game for a month or so out of frustration.
This one-hit KO mechanic, placed right near the end of the game, felt like it was punishing me for not choosing the “right” job for Kasuga. The job system is something I really loved experimenting and playing with for much of the game, and now it suddenly felt weaponized against me in a way that hurt the experience and ground the pacing to a halt.
Despite this, I did really enjoy finishing the game. It tells an emotional story about family, identity, and the corruption that comes with power. The acting was great - Kasuaga in particular, voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya, was incredibly well performed. There’s a scene near the end where Kasuga is sort of sob-screaming, and it’s hard to imagine how that would have landed with any other performance.
Like A Dragon, even with its major mechanical change, even with its change of setting, captures so much of what I love about the Yakuza series. While being a pulpy crime story, Like A Dragon is full of heart. Ichiban Kasuga, desperate to be a real version of the video game heroes he played growing up, always wants to fight for what’s right and the people he cares about, at any cost. He’s a very different character from Kazuma Kiryu, but in this way he feels like a wonderful replacement as the franchise’s future face.
This week on the Talking to Ghosts podcast we have the Oklahoma-based noise rock nu metal band Chat Pile! We talked about returning to the movie theaters, how they miss bad movie nights, and being the frat boys of The Flenser.
Chat Pile have a fantastic cover of "Roots Bloody Roots" out now and a new album on The Flenser is expected any day now :)
Talking to Ghosts is produced and recorded by Michael Kurt and Wesley Mueller.
(We are aware of the sound issue on Wes' audio track, sorry for the scratchiness! We hope to resolve this issue soon)