By Patrick Totally
I've known of SPV Laboratories for years now. For most of this time, I knew of him as a noise musician and nothing else (if memory serves, me and him used to post in the same bandcamp threads on /mu/). I only recently became aware of his forays into video essaying. Now, it's not like I expected his videos to be bad or anything, but when I checked out his video about Ryan Trahan and Haley Pham's marriage on a whim a while back, I didn't anticipate that he'd prove himself to be one of the most compelling authors on the platform. I'll be recommending my personal favorite video by him below, but every essay I've watched from him so far comes highly recommended.
Over the course of his lengthy video mixtape "my 100 favorite dance game videos," SPV Laboratories weaves personal annecdote into a broader cultural context to create a legible history of a scene legendary for its mystique. I entered this video knowing next to nothing about dance games and left with a week's worth of self directed homework and a dozen new names in my "followed channels" tab on twitch. It goes down like sugar, too. It's rare to find material edited to this video's level of technique and polish even among YouTube's uppermost echelon of producers, much less so in the field of folks who make no sort of living off the platform. Each music choice, each confounding vocal stutter effect, each blink-and-you'll-miss-it clip of expertly deployed, research intensibe b-roll elevates a fascinating lecture into an immersive aesthetic experience.
SPV's commentary is constantly in service of his video's subjects, as is typically the case with these sorts of top X countdown type videos, but his tone and curation attest to a lifelong love of the topic at hand. At the same time, he does not arrange these videos orbit himself out of any inflated sense of personal worth. He's practicing a humbled sort of subjectivity here. His metrics for what constitutes a "good" dance game video gesture towards correctness as much as they are grounded in his personal preference. When he says a video on his list couldn't be ranked lower than it presently is due to an indescribable feeling in his gut, I believe him. The ill-defined grey area between "best" and "favorite" has never felt so inviting. "my 100 favorite dance game videos" consequently points in several directions at once, towards personal and shared histories alike. The future and past coexist throughout its runtime like a walk through the forest. Its order is in service of articulation, not description.
Fair warning for those unfamiliar with Mr. SPV's work: his page can be a bit overwhelming on first glance. Like I alluded to earlier, he generally doesn't seem to be producting material in service of any sort of algorithm. His upload feed is a slurry of video art, attempts at Guinness World Records, niche shitposts, etc. He's the sort of unspecialized (non-derogatory) creator that got all but weeded out by YouTube's early 2010s shift to view retention based monetization system. It's 100% worth poking around through his uploads. He's got a lot of gems hidden in plain sight. If you'd like to watch more material to a similar effect as "my 100 favorite dance game videos," though, he's got a handy dandy playlist of all his video essays up on his channel. Thank you Mr. SPV!
By Patrick Totally
On "paradise garden," abstract tackle (the duo of Kenichi Matsumoto and Hironobu Itagaki) learn what sounds they could play well and played them. For as confounding as any of these ten individual songs may be on their own, the record as a whole's driven by a tight internal logic. Its sonic palette is strange but fixed. If a concept appears, it is guarenteed to appear somewhere else on the record accompanied by a different supporting roster. For example: the clean, noodly, pervasive saxophone solo that plays throughout the entirety of the record's opener ("rock") might feel like nothing more than a joke at first, a comic foil to the heavily post-processed, artificial sounding instrumation that comprises the rest of the song. By the time you reach "popopo," though, it's hard to imagine the record without it. There's some deadly trills on this thing. That's not to say the saxophone's inclusion isn't a joke. I'm only saying that the joke continues to be good long after it stops being funny. In that way, "paradise garden" shines in its confidence. It insists something is one way until you believe it without ever being a dick about it.
I'm especially enamored by this record's percussion sections. It sounds like the duo is simultaneously tampering with a drum machine and a sampler at differently quantized BPMs. The mismatched beats will frequently alternate between one another without warning or play together at once at opposing corners of the mix. These are the moments that got into my head the most, moments like middle passage of "living," when I'm speeding up and slowing down in four directions at once. A thousand songs blossom and collapse each second. It demands the sort of attention you'd normally give to jazz records with the conductor's last name written out in big block lettering on the front.
What "paradise garden" is is a table of elements. You know that old flash game where you have to paint certain patterns onto balls, and the patterns get more complex as the game goes on? If you don't, don't worry about it. It's like that. I generally got a lot out of tracking the little journeys these instruments went on and who they met along the way. Recommended for hungry ears.
By Pedro P.P
This midwest emo guitar started playing and these gently trembling male vocals shortly followed, it really caught me off guard. And then, when the beat kicked in, i knew this would be a new favorite. Fast, choppy, sad, melancholic, and with a video that completely challenges the sentimental nature of the lyrics, almost child-like in their innocence and sorrow. For what i've heard from other people and my own subsequent Jim Legxacy binge, he's really pushing the envelope in some very elegantly executed ways, and making an unique sound for himself that i'm sure will soon be highly influential and looked up to. Remember his name!
By Pedro P.P
Now, i haven't listened to every single one of their albums but some highlights of their discography would absolutely be "Pink Metal", "SIMO SOO 4EVA!!" and the reason behind this small writeup, "VITAMINZZZ", more specifically the track Anna Nicole Smith, featuring Zsa Zsa LaFine & b00bjob. This sounds violent, sassy, fast... Perfect. Simo Soo is someone we should all pay attention to. Excited to see a future where they're a big big name in the online queer music scene. They deserve it! Remember their name!
By Felis Mors
This record in particular strikes me as a legitimization of a genre marginalized by the name it was given (something that I, a trans person relate to). I felt almost a strange sympathy when I first heard it, and upon actually listening to it, I realized I needed to kill the beast that cringes inside me, because this album fucking slaps. The sassy screamo vocals, and corny aggressive lyrics, in combination with the well played guitars and aggressive drums make the synths fit right in with their sharp tones, and the last two tracks have been in my regular rotation for at least three years.
Don’t fear the cringe, grab your gun and challenge the beast that makes it.
By Felis Mors
Musically, the instrumentation is traditional emo, beautiful guitar and downtempo drums that make you wanna cry, but what really makes it special is the vocals. Nicole Boychuk is screaming her lungs out, burning her throat and yelling some of the most bitter, and at times desperate, lyrics i’ve ever heard. Often I find myself locking myself in the storage room of my house, sobbing and screaming along with her, and it makes me happy to feel like a passing version of a person, recorded in 2015, understands how i feel.
This album is only 17 minutes and change long, and this is one of the few times I don’t want an album to be longer. If it were, my throat would be spurting blood by the end.