Disquiet

Among the keywords in the audio catalog at the Internet Archive, aka archive.org, is the name of a recent video game created for the Nintendo DS handheld: Electroplankton. As many have noted, the game is less a game than it is a toy, in that it has no intended end; it’s a musical tool with a playful graphic interface. There are three Electroplankton-derived musical downloads at archive.org currently (see the tagged files as they accumulate here), most recent among them “Grey Matters” (MP3), credited to JR Nielsen. It’s true to Electroplankton’s aquatic metaphors, with enough burbling to fill a small brook and enough light mallet-sounding work to suggest the chamber music of Tortoise.

By Marc Weidenbaum