Adjacent Frequencies
There is a corridor in this archive where the exhibits do not hold still. The Keeper has learned to approach it by ear rather than by eye, because what is filed here is mostly sound, and sound has opinions about where it will stay.
The premise of the wing is simple and slightly disreputable: that the games in the other rooms did not arrive from nowhere. Somebody was playing a Casio in a basement. Somebody was gluing a magazine together out of borrowed images because nobody would print the real one. Somebody who could not draw a straight line drew the thing anyway and sold twelve copies of it. The archivist has been circling this material for years without quite admitting it is a subject, and the Keeper — who takes a professional interest in things filed under miscellaneous — has finally hung it as one.
The spine of the wing is a weekend in November. A festival came west, took over a vegan bar on a hill in Seattle for three days, and ran roleplaying sessions in the early evening and live performances until one in the morning. The archivist went, ran games for strangers, and — this being the part the Keeper enjoys — wandered the room afterwards with a microphone, collecting people. What comes back is not criticism. It is field recording: musicians explaining their equipment with the particular seriousness of those who have not yet been asked about it, one of them mid-way through the first day of his life as a performer.
From that weekend everything else in the corridor follows. A magazine met at a merchandise table. A game met at the same table, argued over at length. The archivist’s own instrument, no larger than a playing card, which turns out to have made most of the noises this channel has ever made. And at the far end, zines whose rules fit in a paragraph and whose remaining forty pages are simply pictures — filed as games, shelved as art, and the Keeper has stopped trying to settle which.
Five older panels hang among the new, unmarked as ever.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Dungeon Siege West - Fantasy Gaming and Dungeon synth Convention — three days of dungeon synth, and he packs the two games nobody can buy any more.
- Dungeon Siege West - Interview Highlights - Part 1 — a man is interviewed hours before playing his first live note ever.
- Cryptic Explorers - The Interview (warning - LOUD audio) — a corporation drills into the land of the dead; you are the second wave.
- Die Wurst - The Official Dungeon Degenerates Zine - Quick Flip Through — seven dollars for the influences, and nearly seven again to post it.
- Lurker Magazine - Metal, Punk, Outsider Art, Tabletop games and RPGs — one issue shipped with a whole solo game about a house under siege.
- Dungeon Dive Synth - The Sounds You Hear — the box behind ninety per cent of this channel’s music samples its own radio.
- A Look at Some Mork Borg Supplements and My Top 5 Metal Albums of 2022 So Far — cult generators, a cemetery campaign, then an unannounced swerve into album rankings.
- Jamzilla - the line between art and game blurred into oblivion (and a long tangent) — the rules are one paragraph; he may never play it and does not care.
- Dark Stone Magazine #1 - Flip Through / An Ode to the Humble Magazine (Shadows of Brimstone) — an argument for the finite object, in an age of the infinite scroll.
- Music for Gaming (passive listening) vs. Miles Davis (active listening) — dungeon synth as the chill-out room of black metal, then Bitches Brew.
- The Restless - The Masterwork of an Outsider (Review) — a Golden Torch awarded for how a game feels, not for anything it does.
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– The Keeper
Owns no instrument, having found that a sufficiently quiet room will play whatever is required of it.