Review Summary: 8-bit, ambient-techno horror about a video-arcade that turns unsuspecting visitors into the undead. What's not to love?
Here’s a treat: initially just ambient-dub but now retro sci-fi infused project Woob has released a sonic psychological thriller about a small town video arcade that springs to life after midnight and transforms all visitors into the undead.
As fans have pointed out, this seems to be an adaption of the original Polybius myth: in which an arcade machine would induce nightmares, seizures and hallucinations in ‘80s Portland, with “men in black” periodically arriving to “collect data” for some shadowy US government institution. All records of Polybius were later “written out of history”, and likewise
Adaption is being taken offline 90 days after its initial release. Both stories share the same primitive core: our fear of the subconscious power of videogames.
I listen to
Adaption and I laugh. Not for the reason you’d expect – that due to our generation’s generous diet of stand-up comedy, panel shows and The Simpsons it is easy to think things only exist insofar as we can ridicule them – but because it’s fun.
Adaption’s popcorn-flick world is created with an admirable sincerity, complete with sickly saturated “atmospheric” synths and authentically basic, albeit carefully textured arcade melodies. Made to mimic the sound of ‘80s sci-fi with a knowingly playful, almost mock-horror twist, the album can sound like the original Tron re-imagined by a particularly sugar-high Guillermo del Toro.
“I tried and I failed“, says a terrified woman at the beginning of “Adaption“,
“I feel like I was out of control”. You kind of get the point – Adaption pulls no punches and the fact it seems to be so incredibly serious only makes it better. The album is retro in intention as well as sounds: stripping away modern irony for a purely indulgent take on one of the more bizarre times of our cultural history. The spaces of ambience dotted throughout
Adaptions are not a chance to giggle at the absurdity but a wholly honest attempt at world-building that is successful to the extent its listeners can remember how to stop being so uptight.
When
Adaption leaps into the virtual nightmare, Woob flip straight from ‘80s sci-fi ambience to the kind of pulsing 8-bit techno that puts most attempts at videogame-inspired music to shame. The barely-bearded manchildren huddled over Gameboy mods in tiny, empty clubs can only dream of the siren-like quality of "Stay Hidden – Adaption Part II". On one hand, the pulsating, militant growl of bass: the soundtrack to a thousand boss fights but, in the interim between the arcade era and now, more of a raver’s call to arms. On the other, crashed 8-bit blips, always increasing in intensity, vividly recreating that very real needle-in-the-arm dopamine crescendo of the perfectly addictive videogame experience. A feeling of complete nirvana for the boy before the arcade machine, but one that’s come to be associated with something much worse for those of us who have had to fight for self-control: danger.
This is the genius of
Adaption – the horror is self-made. Woob steal decades of gaming industry experience to strike where we are weakest, and our response to our own unconscious, uncontrollable thrill is rightfully one of unease.
The brunt of
Adaption’s significance is only possible now. It relies on our knowledge of an ever-growing industry which profits by getting us hooked to virtual realities, of our awareness of psychological studies on the overpowering influence of unconscious instinct, of psychoanalysis, and our lack of self-control. The legend of Polybius seems quaint in a world where people fill in surveys to sell their personal data for virtual currency, or spend a month’s worth of pay on Farmville. Charlie Brooker can say that Twitter is the most influential videogame ever and we can agree – our instincts are on a leash, held by men with bad intentions, and anyone who’s done the smallest amount of research can join in.For all intense and purposes the unaware are zombies: not in control of their own actions;
Adaption wants to emulate an urban legend from the '80s but in 2015 it can only mean so much more.
Because the horror of
Adaption lingers in its meta connotations, the fear of our present state fails to distract from the fact that, on its own terms, the album is still highly entertaining. Our descent into dopamine euphoria is completely guilt-free in a context where Woob only want us to indulge in a bit of cultural nostalgia for an arcade legend we have perhaps vaguely heard of and a genre of cinema that barely continues to exist. Nevertheless, the fact
Adaption is simultaneously light-entertainment and heavy-thought food, and our unmistakable resistance to being dragged into this sonic world, is a quality the album would be much weaker without.
