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I guess our daily tasks as dark sky are more centred around production than they

are djing even though like we do have a massive passion for collecting records

and discovering new music. I was playing the drums quite a few years having that

kind of rhythm backbone has helped a lot also a great way to just like come up

with new rhythms go to the studio and then try and program the beats into the

computer the one thing I remember from school actually is like during our lunch

breaks we were like 'where's Matt? oh Matt is in the music hall having a drum lesson'

I never made that sort of connection of like study music. I was more concerned with

listening to music rather than actually recreating or producing it wasn't until

years later and Matt was like way ahead of us in that respect.

I suppose our sound kind of evolved as we kind of grew, our tastes kind of matured

and going out clubbing I don't think we would have created the music we

created if we hadn't been born in London. If you look at like New York and

that sound, Japan, cities around the world, they all have their sounds. We have a

radio show on NTS which we love digging for music for having that release where

you can leave the studio and play something that you've been working on

tracks that you've kind of been digging, to share them with people that's the

best part of music being able to share it. I guess nothing excites me quite as much

as music, just infatuated by it. I do love other things like film

but I'm not really that concerned about say who directed that film and

what was a previous work from that director whereas I am like say 'oh who

mastered that album and who produced that'

We got to a point after the second album where we were kind of spent for ideas

and we wanted to try fresh approach just to make it interesting for us.

Tom was taking these photos, it was looking really cool. Photography is just

another art form is another outlet for me to be creative.

We actually looked at pictures during the writing process and then I guess it

was all about trying to soundtrack that picture.

The initial concept was kind of like taking a photo very literally so pick out

an element whether it's like a jagged edge in a fence and if it's been

repeated that could be transferred to an LFO on a synthesizer. Really going

literal but that kind of idea kind of faded it away and kind of became more

about the the tone and feeling that was kind of coming off the photo and how

that shaped the sound.

Matt is the main engineer, producer but what was cool about writing

the album we were both like just jumped on whatever we had set up and just

both just noodle away. We were just treating the computer like

the tape deck really, rolling big takes of audio.

Maybe an hour, two-hour three-hour jams and then just go back and we'd have like

60-minute arrangement pages with a few beats on them and then maybe just like start

working in on a one.

Some days we might do sound design days and try and record a load

of LFOs and something which I want to do more of is just build up our own

library of sounds that you can call upon and then just whack them into a

production and you know you've built them from scratch and they're your

sounds.

I feel like technology does shape the sound of a generation if you look

back at music from the 70s and 80s and the 90s and how music could have

changed and the gear was evolving with the music that's been put out. It's

exciting with all this equipment to see how far

you can push it.

We've got two SP-16s which are running the drums for every track that we perform.

We're using four individual outs on each SP-16 and that's just essentially

the kick drum, snare, hats, maybe a bit of percussion and then like a musical

element coming out the fourth one and they are routed into the desk so one track

I might be controlling the drums bringing them in and then for the next

track matt will be bringing in the drums like mixing in via the EQ. Also you could

use the built-in effects to add extra layers like flangers and distortions

bit crushers. I'm also for a couple of tracks using

the SP-16 to control via MIDI the AS-1 just a top line

sequence and then I might add a couple of notes just jamming along. Yeah

it's really well laid out and user-friendly once you start getting

in to know the shift functions, you know, you can just, everything becomes second

nature. Like just being able to jump through

different sections oscillator, oscillator 2 using the shift category you can quickly

just get to what section you're looking for and when you start using the

on-screen editor that comes with it you get your head round it. What's great

about the SP is the slice function on there. It's really easy to use especially if

you come from an Ableton background and then rearrange the groove basically live

Being able to color code what pads are for the instruments is just amazing, so

we have all our kicks and red all the snares in blue and hats in green and

then have that on both machines so I could be on Tom's machine and know

exactly what that is without having to look at the screen. Then also you've got

all the parameter lock options where you can map them to the effects so you can

do step locks for a certain effect. Each scene represents a different track in

the set and then within those scenes will have different patterns which will

switch into as the track progresses. You can see we've got two elements in here

it is just a drum and a bit of percussion which is running from the AS-1

We came from the MPC background and we were just having issues, things not

loading up, compact flashes crashing and clock going out time and then like this

changed everything like we could relax a little bit more, soundcheck became a lot

more stress-free. We've been refining the show each time

we play and I've really taken note what's working, what's not and how the

crowd is responding to certain tracks and then going back and tweaking it. Just

having everything at your fingertips lets you re approach tracks and in ways

that might sound completely different to the original which makes it exciting for

us every time when we're playing

and it's just so much fun to be able to make music and then present that to

people and then them be able to enjoy it and then transfer that energy.

For more infomation >> Behind The Sounds: Dark Sky - Duration: 8:09.

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Mini Read: Dark Souls—Games as Art - Duration: 10:10.

Dark Souls from 2011 is special for a lot of reasons,

but one the most impressive things it does is how it constructs the past.

The way in which the player discovers the past of its world, Lordran,

is a striking metaphor for how historians work, our relationship to the past,

and what we have to do in order to keep it.

Today I'd like to put this into the context of a discussion I've seen blooming up again

around the tubes in the past weeks:

the question of whether games are art or not.

But instead of just further bloating the argument for games as art, I want to try adding something

new to the discussion.

You see, I could wax philosophical about Duchamp's urinal, Wittgenstein's or Immanuel Kant's

ideas on art and aesthetics, or try to define concepts—

but would that really have any potential impact?

Would that help?

I also wouldn't want to write a polemic against other voices around the internet arguing

for the inclusion of games, for reasons which will hopefully become clear.

Roger Ebert, on the other hand...well, on a map representing the art establishment he's here.

If anything, with the only caveat being that he is sadly no longer with us, he could be

brought down a peg or two.

It's certainly true that the argument against games as art is a semantic one, and consequently

its goal is exclusion.

So I'd like to start off with a thought from Ebert himself:

"Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?

… Do they require validation?"

Welcome to Ludocriticism.

This is Mini-Read, a series where we step back from the big picture,

and look at single elements from a game.

In Dark Souls, the past is not laid out before you as it is in so many other games with rich back stories.

Instead, you need to search for tiny scraps of the past—

scraps found in item descriptions, architecture, and environmental designs—

in order to create a full picture of just what has happened in its dystopian world.

It's a process of breaking up elements of myth, legend, and history and putting them

back together that took a communal effort from players to reach something close to a conclusion.

The process can be seen as a metaphor, or even analogy, to how the historian works.

The historian, too, needs to sift through fragments of the past together with a global

community to make some sense of those parts of our existence that aren't with us anymore.

Dark Souls requires a 50 hour long flourish of creative expression to represent so well

the tragedy of how much of the past always continues to be lost to posterity.

It's an astounding expression of the conditions of the human experience, and I can't imagine

any of our other mediums being able to represent it so competently.

But here's the thing: studying, or even appreciating, art is inherently demanding.

It requires interpretation, which is a skill you need to cultivate.

Jonathan Blow has spoken at length about his desire for games to speak to the human condition.

But I think they already do.

There are other examples that, albeit doing things differently from Dark Souls' construction of the past,

also speak to a condition of human existence.

Shadow of the Colossus can pretty easily be read as a parable of the environmental damage

humans cause: the world is cold and uncaring, populated only by these mysterious colossi

we're unable to communicate with.

And we—the players, humans—react by decimating the only other possible life-forms,

as if the cold and uncaring world is some great unfairness thrust upon us that entitles us

to not only not take care of that only world we have, but also destroy those we share it with.

That's definitely there if you want to see it, and know how to find it.

Then there's Journey, which can easily be read as a representation of the generality

of all human life-times.

You're a nondescript character in a culturally nondescript world.

You run into other non-descript characters controlled by other players—

sometimes you share only a moment of your respective journeys,

and sometimes you spend a good chunk of it traveling together.

You encounter mystery, hardship even, but also triumph, joy, and beauty,

before you make a final climb into oblivion.

That's there too, if you look for it.

Even a game like QWOP, which is absolutely absurd, can be viewed as a meditation on our

relationship to our own bodies:

are your limbs you, or are they separate?

Are they something in between, acting on your behalf but only insofar as some vague and

undefined feeling of distance allows them to.

All these things are there in all of these games, but only if you look for them and have

the ability to see them.

Only once gamers as community members grow old enough, and take themselves seriously enough

to actually have some interpretive skills and qualifications to know what to

look for and how to share their ideas with other members of the same community,

do these things travel outside of the games.

I think we're in that transition now.

Ebert's words from the start of this video become relevant in light of this,

and they betray both a privilege and a lack of compassion on the part of Ebert.

Why wouldn't we require validation?

Ebert seems to take for granted whatever grace made him—

—the son of an electrician from Illinois—

the first film critic to receive the first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Isn't it true that the prize he received validated film lovers from around the world?

Isn't it true that it validated the medium as such?

In 2010, Ebert wrote a rebuttal to the criticism levied at his views on video games through

a critique of a Ted Talk arguing for games as art.

He concludes like this:

"I allow Santiago the last word...

[Oh, Roger, you're too generous!]

Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent,

I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art.

The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management.

I rest my case."

His wildly condescending tone aside, that's a damn good point.

But he fails to realize that capital is, and always has been, incredibly slow to include

marginal markets.

Making something with a marginal market in mind is risky, so most market actors require

a trailblazer to prove the profitability of said marginal market.

That just makes sense.

The industry is not what's going to validate games as art.

So what is?

It ultimately falls to the gaming community, because Ebert, and people like him,

have nothing to gain by actively including gamers in his world of art...except, you know, being a better

person than he is mandated to be.

My point is he's being rude by omission, and if he's so appreciative of art he could

maybe aspire to be a better fellow human, as art so often inspires us to be.

A more compassionate reaction would be to say "Wow, you find some existential meaning

in this seemingly meaningless thing?

That's wonderful, what are you seeing?"

Gamers are in a special place when it comes to the two strategies of exclusion and inclusion.

We still remember, as a culture, a time when our medium was connected to a

sense of stigma and shame.

So I present you now:

the Ludocriticism Guide to Validation From the Art Establishment™:

Step 1: Hang out in basements and hide your enjoyment of games from society...like a troll.

Step 2: Start demanding things from games.

Step 3: Allow games to demand something from you—interpretation—

and rise up to the occassion.

Step 4:

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Profit.

I think we're in between step two and step three at this point in time.

But I'd ask this: do you see Roger Ebert in this step-by-step guide?

Do you see the gaming industry?

I don't.

I see us.

And if I'd venture a guess as to what step four would consist of, it would be this:

help legitimizing the meaning others find in games.

Be it Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, QWOP, or any other game,

appreciate the meaning you and other people find in them.

Share it with others.

Shove it down their throats.

You'll probably find that you won't have to push very hard at all,

because below a certain age everybody plays games—

—whether you know about it or not, and whether they admit it or not.

Whatever grace has allowed us to be here in this historical moment that contains video games,

this is going to be our lives.

Sooner or later, they too will be lost to posterity.

Thanks so much for watching!

And thanks for the responses to the first episode of Mini-Read—

that obviously means a lot to me.

How do you feel about the artsy aspect of video games?

Can you just not shut up about your intense interest, or do you think Janet in accounting's

Candy Crush obsession doesn't qualify as a mutual interest?

Please remember to subscribe—but only if you picked the first option.

Also, remember to keep taking games way too seriously.

For more infomation >> Mini Read: Dark Souls—Games as Art - Duration: 10:10.

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Avicii suicide confirmed as footage reveals DJs dark thoughts: 'I should be happy' - Duration: 4:02.

Avicii suicide confirmed as footage reveals DJs dark thoughts: 'I should be happy'

On April 26, Tim Berlgings family released a statement confirming the superstar DJs cause of death as suicide.

Now in newly-unearthed footage from Aviciis True Stories documentary, the star admits touring destroyed his life.

  Then I found the magical cure of having a couple of drinks before going on stage.

To a part that is what helped me do all those shows without feeling completely exhausted.

"I started to feel crazy.

Everything on the checklist is there so I should be happy" Avicii   He added: My life was a dream to so many people, including myself but it was a lot of work a lot of heavy tours.

I just kind of went with all the punches that came along because I was so extremely lucky to be able to do what I am doing.

I didnt take the time to really figure out what I wanted to do – I just went along with the flow.  .

Between 2008 and 2013 the Lonely Together hit-maker played 657 shows around the globe.

When asked if he finds his life weird during an interview in Australia, Tim replied: I am Avicii but at the same time peoples perception of who Avicii is isnt who Tim is.

Im a little bit shy, I dont like being the centre of attention, butt i am [centre of attention] that is what makes it so weird. Opening up about his darker moments the Swedish star said: Everyone else was doing what I was doing and they seemed to be doing fine.

then I started to feel crazy.

Everything on the checklist is there so I should be happy.

I should have taken half a year off and recovered from not just the pain medicine [from his having his gallbladder out] but from the illnesses from all the years of touring but I kept going. Avicii was found dead in his hotel The Muscat Hills Resort in Oman.

A statement, which was released in Swedish his family, said: Our beloved Tim was a seeker, a fragile artistic soul searching for answers to existential questions.

An over-achieving perfectionist who travelled and worked hard at a pace that led to extreme stress.

When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be happy and be able to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness.

He could not go on any longer..

For more infomation >> Avicii suicide confirmed as footage reveals DJs dark thoughts: 'I should be happy' - Duration: 4:02.

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MORTAL ENGINES / SMRTELNÉ STROJE Trailer (2018) CZ TIT | Planet Dark - Duration: 1:30.

For more infomation >> MORTAL ENGINES / SMRTELNÉ STROJE Trailer (2018) CZ TIT | Planet Dark - Duration: 1:30.

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Kanye West: The Beautiful Dark Twisted Philosopher - Duration: 14:35.

Kanye West: The Beautiful Dark Twisted Philosopher

Kanye West returned to Twitter last week in typical Kanye fashion— a little bit funny, a little bit arrogant, and a little bit artistic.

His first tweet was a retweet of the creator of Twitter welcoming him back to the platform.

Its the kind of self-reflexive humor only Kanye could pull off, and for a moment it almost appeared humble— a fresh start to the Zen, philosopher iteration of Kanye West.

And then he reminded us that no one is ever ready for a Kanye party.

Self-promotion, photos of clothing, inscrutable bits of sublimated animosity.

These can be exhausting, but are routine enough to remain tolerable.

The danger (and thrill) is how any one of these expected actions can careen into a feud with Wiz Khalifa, tweets of Kim Kardashian nude, irresponsible political musings, or messages like BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!!..

Since Kanye's disappearance from Twitter last May, there's been no shortage of spectacle propelled by 140-character screeds and egomaniacs.

And along with the unanswerable (at the heart of it all, doesnt it all help promote the various release dates we now know about?) question of Why now?, his return left many asking when the next controversy would erupt.

The consensus seemed to be that he's too crazy, too black, too vocal, too flagrant not to blow.

For about a week he had us convinced that the opposite might be true— that he might be too crazy to engage with the spectacle and flippancy fostered by (now) 240-character discourse.

In a recent interview with Axel Vervoodt, Kanye revealed that he was working on a book of philosophy titled Break the Simulation and the last week has seen him convert Twitter into a public first-draft.

Kanyes narcissism was seemingly tucked away, then, as he set his sights on becoming the visionary who will save us all.

Philosopher Kanye wants to break the simulation and become something more real— he wants to "be water." That transformation is tied to a denunciation of capitalism, competitiveness, and ownership of ideas (ironically all crucial to his own enterprises) and an emphasis on practical steps toward personal growth.

This is a space that celebrities don't inhabit on Twitter and if they do it's not in the way Kanye West does it.

Most celebrities, and most Twitter users for that matter, deal in the concrete.

For them, anything approaching philosophical stays grounded in a specific events or moments.

For example, a discourse on capitalism might mean sponsoring a specific 'fair-trade' clothing company while criticizing sweatshops.

Or they might retweet an article to show support for a protest movement.

Kanye West is spreading his message piecemeal using vague maxims with broad applicability (like the tweet, "question everything," given with absolutely no context).

One way to read him is to say that Kanye's benign truisms offer an alternative to the vitriol that seems to dominate Twitter interactions.

He's not harming anyone, and maybe he's making some people feel better, so leave him be.

Other people might be content to shrug him off as a celebrity with his head up his ass.

The former theory unravelled further this past weekend, with the revelation of Kanye's continued support for harmful right-wing political pundit Candace Owens, giving some credence to the latter.

Still, it's worth treating Kanye's latest creative project with serious consideration if we want to know how to respond.

In a series of video tweets shared by Kanye West, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons (and a Trump supporter), broke down his understanding of Kanye's new cultural and social function.

It was the clearest explanation of the simulation Kanye is "breaking" for us.

According to Adams, by tweeting about Candace Owens, the black political pundit and Black Lives Matter critic, Kanye forces our minds to grapple with a paradox, and the dissonance is the key to liberation.

By putting himself, an artist and champion of black rights (in his own way) aside a conservative pundit, Kanye's followers will discover new ways of conceiving of race and equality.

Now apply this to the thousands of other issues that face our society— simulation broken.

Except for an enormous contradiction in the plan. Kanye says he wants to take the information [he has].

and help as many people as possible. Kanye's project looks to be something like providing actionable information (or inspiration) to people to make the world better in some unspecified way.

The irony is that his more specific philosophies aren't in any way unique, and his bigger ideas are so vague that the information can't be deciphered.

A tweet like "everyone should be their own biggest fan" is straightforward enough, though not something that would prompt anyone to view the world differently.

How, though, should we reckon with "new ideas will no longer be condemned by the masses. We are on the frontier of massive change.

Starting from breaking out of our mental prisons."? There is no elaboration on what those mental prisons are or how we can counter them.

If these tweets are Kanye's plan to break the simulation, he is only pushing us deeper into it.

Meanwhile, the only concrete answers he can promise, according to Hot 97 host Ebro Daren, are packaged into one of the many albums he is promoting.

Kanye West used to be the guy who went on TV and said: George Bush doesn't care about black people. He was the guy who interrupted Taylor Swift and initiated a cold war that made it impossible to ignore race's messy heritage in pop-music.

Put simply, Kanye created the expectation that hip-hop should remain plugged into the culture it was already commenting on in its music.

That its artists should have big, loud, controversial thoughts to contribute to the discussion of both politics and art.

I think he might now be looking back and asking, perhaps pessimistically, what good has that done us? As far as Twitter is concerned, digging deeper into conversations on culture, race, capitalism has only entangled us in the simulation.

The tangible results of that project were an exhausting, doomed tour, Kanye's hospitalization, and a controversial meeting with Donald Trump.

Think about The Life of Pablo's roll-out, with it's chaos inextricably rooted in its cultural moment, with last minute changes and dramas commented on in real time and in the album.

And still we have kept moving forward along that path. Twitter has become every young rapper's playground.

Many Soundcloud rappers have adopted a social-media first, music second mentality that makes Twitter an invaluable tool for sparring with haters and burnishing your star.

Drake's Instagram posts during the making of "God's Plan" were nearly as crucial to the buzz as the music video itself.

And even Jaden Smith has matured from weird Twitter-kid to promoter of boxed water and environmentalism Twitter-kid.

Compared to his peers Kanye has moved backyard on the platform by turning cultural dialogue into skepticism and by letting narcissism overtake his message (again).

This is his greatest sin, not as a rapper, but as a so-called philosopher.

His "questioning everything" philosophy isn't freeing anyone because all it does is say that you are free if you go against the mainstream, no matter what that mainstream is (like challenging the validity of Black Lives Matter).

Look at his earliest tweets, when he said, "be fearless.

Express what you feel not what youve been programmed to think." By itself, thats a sound piece of advice.

But to Kanye West, that means Donald Trump is a visionary because he expresses ideas that offend people without caring about the consequences.

For more infomation >> Kanye West: The Beautiful Dark Twisted Philosopher - Duration: 14:35.

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Dark Chocolate Might Help You See Better, Research Suggests - Duration: 0:15.

For more infomation >> Dark Chocolate Might Help You See Better, Research Suggests - Duration: 0:15.

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Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals She Went Into 'Dark Place' When She Had Postpartum Depression - Duration: 2:38.

Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals She Went Into 'Dark Place' When She Had Postpartum Depression

Gwyneth Paltrow is all smiles as she joined hosts Stephen and Elisa Summers at their Goop Dallas Launch with a toast to the 70th Anniversary of The Original Margarita with Cointreau, created by Dallas's own Margarita Sames, on Thursday (April 26).

That same day, the 45-year-old actress and goop founder spoke openly about her experience with postpartum depression during a candid conversation with her mom, actress Blythe Danner, on her Goop Podcast.

"When I had Apple, my experience with myself was completely transformed," Gwyneth expressed about the birth of her 13-year-old daughter.

"I was so in love with her, I still am.".

Gwyneth then noted that her experience giving birth to her 12-year-old son, Moses, wasn't quite as blissful: "I had terrible post-natal depression, which I think was really shocking to me because I never thought that I would be a person who got post-natal depression," Gwyneth explained.

"I was so euphoric when Apple was born, and I assumed it would happen with Mosey and it took a while.

I went to a dark place.".

For more infomation >> Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals She Went Into 'Dark Place' When She Had Postpartum Depression - Duration: 2:38.

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MUGEN: The Dark Layers Of Blood Chronicle - Replay 5 - Shantae VS Garfield Aero Army - Duration: 1:59.

Are you ready for the next battle?

I´m R-R-R-R-R-Ready!

WHAT!?

The battle begins!