Mark Danks

I picked up Every Extend Extra Extreme (E4) this weekend. And by “picked up”, I mean I bought it from the XBox Live Marketplace. E4 is the newest game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi. He did some of my favorite games of all time: Rez, Lumines, and Meteos.

Mizuguchi-san is very interested in synesthesia, the idea that visual and audio elements can be mixed together. Kandinsky and Scriabin are probably two of the most famous people who experienced it. Mizuguchi-san referred to Rez as K-Project in reference to Kandinsky.

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I added back the music page. The page is pieces which I wrote mainly back in graduate school many years ago. There are some audio files, scores, and other notes about the pieces.

Lately, I’ve been “composing” ambient pieces. I listen to a wide range of music, from Fred Hersch to Frederic Chopin to David Lang to Nine Inch Nails to James Holden. However, when I create music, it tends to be more like Biosphere or Stars of the Lid. Once I am happy with some of them, I will post them here.

A few months ago, I bought a piano. Nothing special, just a Yamaha upright console piano. I have played piano since 1st grade and took lessons for about 12 years. During college and graduate school, I played off and on, although it usually involved working on my own pieces.

My daughter started taking piano lessons a few months ago, which is what caused me to buy a piano. I have not sat down as often as I would have liked to play it…I am sure that she plays it more than I do these days. But days like today make it worthwhile. I played for well over an hour. Mostly I played the “old standbys” like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Bartok, and Satie (yeah, Bartok and Satie are “old standbys” to me…my Master’s degree is in 20th Century composition…what do you expect). Being able to sightread those pieces and enjoy them is something which I am extremely happy that I can still do. Apparently, all of those years of lessons which my mother forced on me actually paid off.

I need to make sure that I spend much more time playing music…maybe I’ll even dig up my classical guitar…