Altair Nouveau

In City of Glass, the first part of Paul Auster's mind-bending New York Trilogy there is a storyline about a man who longs for a language that is not already loaded with meaning. It is a reasonable desire (if a tad futile). But, instead of writing a scholarly essay on the subject, he has a kid (not on his own), who he locks in a basement room, only ever feeding, though never communicating with. Unsurprisingly, this did not result in said child achieving lexical putiry, but created a very pasty, oddball who had the father locked up at the first opportunity.

Nevertheless, there is the seed of a very good idea in this. Not the language part, which is an awful idea unless you are an overly zealous disciple of Jacques Derrida. Even if the kid stumbles upon a lyrical clarity, they will merely be using a bunch of sounds, all but meaningless in the outside world. At best this will result in severe bullying at school, at worst it is a one way ticket to Hermitsville.

For the record, the good idea is not the locking up of the kid part either, let's ditch the child bit and the locking-up side of things too. Although we are being strictly hypothetical, there is no need to do so in a way that may mistakenly alert the authorities. What it got me thinking about was, what it would be like if you could completely control the musical influences of a musician, so that the only ingredients that went into their music were of your choosing.

This makes for a very enjoyable game that you can play with friends on those drunken evenings when everyone keeps stopping each other's tunes halfway through, going "no, honestly, this is amazing..." The way it works is that you get a pen and a bit of paper and before putting on a track you write down a maximum of three influences that you, as hypothetical musical overlord of the act you are about to play, allowed them to listen to when growing up. You play the track and your listeners have to guess at least two of the three influences (they can be acts, genres, single tracks, whole albums etc.) you have written on the paper. If they do not guess right, you get to play a track by each of the two or three influences they did not manage to guess. If your compadres feel strongly that you are wrong, or that they too, see threads of influence in the music then they can also play tracks.

The following is an example:

Say the tune i am playing is Cosmos by Altair Nouveau. Before having done so, I would have written on a piece of paper the following three things:

Logic System- Unit

A Guy Called Gerald- Voodoo Ray

Omar S- Psychotic Photosynthesis

Download, listen and once you have the jist of it, then play with friends. The overall objective of this wonderful game, is to allow you and your crew to get knee deep in each other's musical worlds.

*Please note that the people you play this with must be relatively close friends who you know are into music. It will be a disaster otherwise. Also, do not play this at parties, as you and your friends will seem like muso wankers and everyone will hate you.