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Review: Shaker by Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot

There's a self-deprecating joke amongst fans of New York noise rock pioneers Swans that goes something along the lines of: 'What's your favourite Swans song?' 'The one with a single guitar chord repeated for ten minutes while someone screams "suicide" over the top' 'But wait... isn't that all of them?!'. Cue a chorus of laughing music nerds. Joking aside, there's something to be said for the mind-melting experimentalism of repetitive music, and while that Swans joke is a bit of an exaggeration, there are times when a simple hypnotic loop can offer something quite fascinating to listen to. In this regard, I wonder if that was the intention of Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot on their latest single Shaker, or whether the track's trance-like effect is simply an incidental effect of it's composition?

Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot is a rather enigmatic artist, with little information available about them other than the name and location of the person behind it. This sense of mystery does however mean the focus is put squarely onto the music, which consists of a discography of singles, EPs and albums going back more than a decade. Even though I wouldn't call Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot's music vaporwave in the strictest sense, there is something about it that is influenced by vaporwave's wistful aesthetic.

Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot's music is, as the name would suggest, influenced in various ways by video game music, and on Shaker this influence is espoused in a particularly pure way. The track consists of a looping refrain that throws around a host of eclectic and percussive electronic sounds in the kind of abstract yet orderly way which video games of the last century used to do so well. Across the three minutes and twenty seconds we're left to absorb these sounds on repeat; there's no peaks and troughs, no pushes and pulls, none of the tension and release that is present in most typical songs. In fact there's really no discernible change in the loop for the whole running time.

This construction does of course run the risk of becoming boring, and it has to be said that Shaker isn't a track which will hold your focus on repeat listens or allow you to search for new depths on each play through. However, that criticism only really holds if you take Shaker in isolation, whereas the best way to understand it is as a part of the wider Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot musical idea which, it's safe to say, is a rather unique one.

I'm sure that Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot isn't the only artist who is essentially making video game music for video games that don't exist. People do it with film music, so why not video games? A scan through Bandcamp or Soundcloud would likely bring up a number of other artists in this vein too, but how many will have such a vast discography of music and show such a constant dedication to this form?

Shaker isn't a good song in the traditional sense, but then that isn't what Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot is attempting to do here. So rather than judging it alongside other electronic music, just sit back, turn it up and soak yourself in these weird, disconcerting and hypnotic sounds. You might like it, you might not, but you will definitely find it interesting.


Listen to Shaker and other music by Hollywood Video Game Kill-Bot on Spotify

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