Playing Games to Make Music to Play Games to

The gaming community has always been associated with Heavy Metal. I can recally an edition of White Dwarf back in the nineties which included a plastic disc of a particularly execrable death metal track by a band called Bolt Thrower. If you look at the boardgamegeek music microbages there's a predominance of metal and rock fan badges. I don't know why it should be so, but it is.

I used to be a bit of a metalhead, a long long time ago, but my musical tastes have broadened significantly since then. While metal can be fun and is good for many things I'm not entirely sure it's much good for playing games to - it's loud, demanding and energetic and tends toward the theatrical instead of the genuinely atmospheric. Sadly for me, the guy who hosts most of our game nights has a nice line in sixties psychedelia and I've spent more game nights listening to the likes of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd than I care to remember. Great artists all, but it's music that needs to be sat and listened to rather than played in the background.

So, having been rebuked on last weeks' column for becoming far too speculative and serious, I thought I'd devote this slot to looking at a few musical styles that I favour as backdrops to Ameritrash gaming nights.

Rap

Semi-autos roar in the building hall
Symptoms of bloodsport, the slugs are still in wall

I used to really hate Rap music until I discovered one day that, like most musical styles, the stuff that gets the most airplay on the TV and the radio are usually the most useless examples of any given genre. I still think a lot of Rap albums are full of filler material but the stuff that stands out is so good that they're worth a spin in any case.

What really surprises me about Rap is that it's pretty much the only kind of music that I find can really generate a latent feeling of threat. Metal tries but it's just pantomime violence - it's so over the top that it's hard to take it seriously. Rap artists on the other hand tend to sound not only like they mean it, but that they've done it before and seen the consequences and the lyrical threat is intensified by the stripped down, sparse nature of the backing music. The past-masters of this are the Wu-Tang Clan who have an ability to sound deadly serious once you've got past the enourmous drag factor the rather comical name. My opening quote on this sector is from a track called Let my Niggas Live from the album The W, is possible the most dense, strangling track I've ever heard in my life. Another track from the same album Careful (Click, Click) manages the same feat. The Wu debut album, 39 Chambers features a number of between-track skits including one where clan members sit around discussing aspects of torture in an off-hand fashion. Next time you have a horror-themed game night, put together a collection of tracks like this for the background instead of the metal and see if it freaks you out as much as it does me.

The natural match up for Rap music in terms of game style though is, of course, gangster games like Blood Feud in New York. For these sorts of games there's plenty of rappers who don't take themselves terribly seriously who can help set the mood. Try something by Cypress Hill for instance with their nice line in cartoon violence which occasionally veers over into genuinely scary stuff, with the shock coming from the sudden contrast. Or, particularly for Blood Feud, check out the Fun Lovin' Criminals and their brand of smug, often highly comical rapping.

A final heads up here is that a number of rap artists have an abiding obsession with Kung-Fu films and the more overt efforts in this genre are great for backing up games with an eastern flavour. Probably my favourite rap album ever belongs in this category - the fantastic Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang member GZA. It contains no filler whatsoever and is packed to the brim with great rapping and memorable kung-fu samples. So good it might even enliven Samurai to the point where it's bearable to play.

Folk

Now they have taken out his heart and stuck it on a spear
They took it to the house of Mar and gave it to his dear

Read that quote again - it's from Sir James the Rose by Steeleye Span - and tell me how it's not 100% Ameritrash? It's got medieval weapons, violence and taunting of the vanquished all packaged neatly in one rhyming couplet. There's vast archives of European folk music that are just like this - filled with history, fighting and supernatural themes. It's just the ticket for fantasy game nights.

For fantasy lovers, it's the overt inclusion of ghosts, monsters, goblins and such that really sells it. The fact that the music was largely written by people who still believed that such things were real lends it a particularly effective edge. There's ever flavour of fantasy you could want here. For a more grisly atmosphere how about the ghostly, ghastly Famous Flower of Serving Men or the murderous protagonist of Long Lankin. Elves (and not the sort of elves Tolkien wrote about) get a number of mentions in songs like Seven Hundred Elves and Thomas the Rhymer. If want more hideous monsters try out the horrible haunt in King Henryor the vile witch Alison Gross.

I also wonder why folk music isn't more popular amongst wargamers given it's strong link to historical material in which battles feature strongly. There are evocative accounts of a huge number of battles from the bloody affair that was the Battle of Harlaw in 1411 all the way up to songs from the First and Second World Wars.

Electronica

Electronic music covers a very broad variety of musical forms, many of which are far too high energy or far too low energy to use as theme music for a game night. However, the lack of lyrics (hence no quote to begin this section) means it makes great background music and the modernist nature of making it means it's eminently suitable to accompany sci-fi games.

I can remember hearing a compilation album called Trance Europe Express which was just taylor made for this kind of experience. A glance at some of the track names - Black Hole, Gravity Pull, The Colour of the Sun - will confirm this. It's a hard album to track down now, but well worth the effort. Another compilation to check out in the same vein is Earthjuice with the 1984-inspired Soma Holiday and the spaced out Universal Message.

Some artists working in this field have released concept albums with a powerful sci-fi theme. Although it's rather on the ambient side, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld by The Orb is a great example - it makes a great partner with Twilight Imperium since the game is engaging enough to keep you awake through the music and the album (a double) is long enough to accompany the games' vast play time. Check out Earth (Gaia) on disc 1, with its Flash Gordon sample for a particularly evocative effort.

*****

I hope that's given you a few ideas for music for your next game night. I'll end with a bonus question - kudos to anyone who can identify the album title that inspired the title for this post - a great album by one of my favourite artists.