I just saw the first episode and I have mixed feelings about its mixed reality presentation. Fundamentally, the whole concept seems to be directed at an audience who don't quite understand how virtual world avatars work, created by producers who definitely don't know how they work. Which is strange, because the vast majority of the show's target Gen Y/Z audience (I'm tempted to say all of them) have an avatar in Fortnite and other virtual worlds.
Speaking of which, as I suspected, the show uses Unreal, the graphics engine that also runs Fortnite:
"Polygon Sea" is a rocking, Radiohead-ish new track (recently featured on the BBC!) by Alien Alarms, the one-man band fronted by Jim Purbrick. (Disclosure: A buddy from way back in our Linden days.) It's inspired, Jim tells me, by "Radiohead's 'Pyramid Song', the billionaire space race and the Second Life residents who used to ask me about uploading their consciousness into SL."
I've caught countless live music performances streamed into Second Life over the years, but performer Katica Pajic (Katiaportugal.genesis in SL) has a fresh new twist that I haven't seen before: While performing in SL, she also streams her computer display/webcam feed on Facebook and YouTube. That way, you not only get to watch the virtual show, but can also watch Katia singing (and chatting with her audience) in real life.
She started doing shows like this in April 2020, during the height of the pandemic, and after a brief pause, began doing so again, often performing twice in one night.
The inspiration, she tells me, is "to show people how it looks from the performer's side and who are they behind their mic." And also, that "I am not just an SL name... I am a person."
I love this extra level of engagement, and it's also a smart way for performers to build their brand. Anyway, Katia's next show is set for tomorrow at Noon and 2pm SLT -- follow her Facebook and/or her YouTube channel to watch!
Dropping on YouTube just an hour or so ago, here's the latest music video of BYNORAL, aka Yasushi Watanabe, a major figure in the J-Pop world (he's composed songs for top girl groups AKB48 and Nogizaka46) who earlier this year spun off a side project creating music videos in Second Life. Video summary:
This track is a sentimental song that incorporates various elements of electro, chill, and pop with the theme of light and darkness of modern society.
Not quite seeing the dark side of this beautifully shot, candy-colored video, but maybe the lyrics are where the shadows reside. He was actually active in SL ten years ago, so this side gig represents a return to the virtual world. (His new brand "BYNORAL”, by the way, is a play on "binaural stereo system."
For a user-created virtual world that's nearly 20 years old, it's difficult for anyone to create the first something in its category, but Zatch Ixchel has probably done just that: "MESHONME" is the first rap song inspired by Second Life that I'm aware of. And it's actually damn good, with a solid trap beat matched to Zatch's staccato rapping of uniquely clever rap lyrics that only SLers will understand:
I come thru with a lil sum suttin
You come thru with a Ruth to the function
Boy, you better poof, better move it or somethin
I'm bout to blow thru the damn roof with the dumb shit
Got a new suit with the HUD shit too
Only shed blood with a new tattoo
They're so on point, I thought he must also rap in real life, but he tells me no.
"I choose to do it in relative privacy/anonymity, even in real life," as he puts it. "I suppose this is because I see it as a character I am playing. To put my face on something like that would feel inauthentic. In Second Life, I don't have that issue."
"MESHONME" is very much about SL culture: "I guess I was inspired by the inherent materialism of Second Life," Zach tells me, "which complements the Hip Hop genre rather well. I also thought it would be funny to watch someone try and flex that sort of bravado and wealth in the context of a virtual world."
Nailed it. As does the video, which stars his RL wife Lucie. Full lyrics below courtesy Mr. Ixchel, who's originally from New York -- in case anyone wants to get an East Coast/West Coast avatar rivalry going.
This totally charming SL music video incorporates Japanese-themed locations with Japanese pop music, and there's a very good reason for that: Both the video and the music are by Yasushi Watanabe, and if you follow J-Pop, you're probably already familiar with his music.
"He composes music for many Japanese major singers including AKB48 and Nogizaka46 (do you know these big groups of Japanese girls?) He composed some music for anime and games too." (He also composed this banger by Guilty Kiss.)
To promote his spin-off project, called BYNORAL, Sanny tells me Watanabe returned to Second Life recently, since he had first explored the platform almost a decade ago:
This is not surprising, because founder and lead singer Roman Rappak was greatly inspired by a chance encounter he had with a taxi driver who told him about his second life.
If you listen carefully, in fact, you can even hear a snippet of audio from that conversation in “I Used To Say Things To Strangers” (above), one of the band's latest videos. In it, the driver is telling Roman about his alternate life in a Second Life community for Zen Buddhists.
“He kept talking about ‘this world’, as if his life in Second Life was much more important,” Roman tells me now, with wonder.
It helped him realize that “entire populations are more at home or feel more effective in the virtual world and have a greater level of agency there as opposed to the real world.”
Rappak got out of the cab, he recalls, “feeling amazed and scared.”
That was about three years ago, roughly around the time that the Brexit vote, which was greatly influenced by Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of social media, had upended Britain, setting it on an unknowable course. “In a way Cambridge Analytica was a massively multiplayer RPG (Facebook) that made something fictional a reality,” Roman now observes.
With those two incidents, “I went through a complete epiphany, on how nothing a band can do can be a statement unless it adapts to the tools of the era.”
He means that in the same way how, in another era, artists like Jimi Hendrix used the latest technology in the 60s to create a sound that came to define that decade. It’s not enough to express how much of a change we’re going through, Roman believes, unless bands of this era adopt the technology of today.
“Things like Second Life say more just by existing than anything bands are doing,” as he puts it. "We should have gigs where after people leave, they feel like they had a view into a virtual world.”
Miro Shot has been doing just that over the last few years, performing shows where the audience wears VR headsets, putting them into an XR experience of the virtual and real. (The band even describes itself as “an AR/VR band/collective”.
A lot of these thoughts are reflected in this Miro Shot video and others. And while they also feature sardonic or darkly ironic images of technology use, it would be a mistake to assume their intent is anti-technology:
You run Soliloquy, and type in your thoughts and feelings about COVID-19 and the quarantine/lockdown. When you type in a keyword, the ambient music evolves to correspond to that mood:
Update, March 26: Seth just let me know the event has now been changed to be a fundraising drive to help combat COVID-19: "This Return Concert will be a benefit with 100% of your donations going to help the World Health Organization's effort to battle Coronavirus," he tells me. "Please consider making a donation. [I] will not have any tip jars at the event, but there will be clickable banners to the WHO donation page at the event. You can also click here to donate directly to WHO."
Here's the kind of live event we haven't seen for quite awhile in Second Life: This coming Sunday (March 29) at 2pm Pacific, musician Seth Regan (known as Mankind Tracer in SL) is returning after a long absence from the virtual world to perform live in a four sim-wide concert. The temporary sims come courtesy of Linden Lab, which is also promoting the show on its official social media channels and in the SL viewer itself.
Mr. Tracer amassed a relatively large fanbase within Second Life in his heyday there, but hasn't performed in SL since 2016 -- and that was for a fundraiser to benefit the children of his good friend and manager, after she tragically lost her life to cancer. Late last year, however, he approached Linden Lab with the idea for this month's free show [now a fundraising event to help the fight Coronavirus -- see update above] with any event donations going half to the American Heart Association and half to his mother, who suffers from heart disease.
Tracer tells me Linden Lab was happy to help sponsor the show with the free sims and promotion:
This current project, as the title suggests, was inspired by the landmark book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and incorporates music from Bach himself. As Robert explains in his liner notes:
This piece started life as a collection of renderings from a machine learning process which was trained on a large database of works by Bach. I then curated some fragments from it and used them as a starting point for a composition for string trio.... We wanted to explore having the audience interact live with the music in a collective strange loop, so I constructed the piece in two "levels" which the players could move between at any time. Level 1 was calmer and more introspective and represented by Blue. Level 2 was more chaotic and extroverted and represented by Red. When the piece was performed the audience held up colored cards, which were recognized by a machine learning camera on the stage. This fed a signal to the players which told them which musical notation to read.
So this is, as Robert puts it to me now, "music composed in collaboration with an AI, which was trained on Bach, then performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, with the audience interacting, guiding the music. Aspects of the music were inspired by themes in Gödel, Escher, Bach, though: At the start and end you hear kinda shepherd tones played by the strings; these are one of the strange loops referred to in Marcus du Sautoy's talk about [Hofstader's book]."
