Midsummer Rockshowcase mainman Jim Guthrie
We’ve written before about Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, the retro-styled video game that brought together the Toronto-based talents of developer Capybara Games, Superbrothers artist Craig D. Adams, and singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie. EDGE Magazine called Sword and Sworcery “a brand new page in the dusty book of adventure games, and an inarguable statement as to how much art and music can give to gaming.”
Guthrie’s pulsating, moody soundtrack interacted with the of old-school game mechanics and pixel art in ways that most music found in videogames never do. Tonight that soundtrack will take centre stage at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, when Guthrie and his band will perform music from S&S, which is also available online and in vinyl as “The Ballad of the Space Babies.”
If the idea for MIDSUMMER ROCKSHOWCASE sounds like a bunch of people standing around listening to the chorus from an old Nintendo game for a couple of hours, rest assured that the tracks have enough energy and variety to be enjoyed on their own. “We always worked under the assumption that the music for the game would be released as a soundtrack,” says Guthrie. “I tried very hard to throw in as many sounds, moods and textures into this game in hopes that it could take the listener places without playing the game.”
Before Sword and Sworcery, Guthrie was best known for his 2003 album Now More Than Ever. Working on a videogame soundtrack, though, was like coming home to Guthrie, whose older compositions were made with a Sony PlayStation disc called MTV Music Generator. “It’s a really well-written music program and you can basically write a lot of cool stuff on it if you learn how to navigate the menu system,” explains Guthrie. “It had a ton of pre-fab garbage beats and worked best for sketching out ideas from scratch.” While he was a gamer since the early 1980s, citing River Raid and Pitfall among his favourites, the PlayStation was used out of necessity rather than artistic flourish, due to not having a band at the time.
The event will also showcase the latest projects from Toronto’s bustling and growing independent games community, which has been building its presence in the games world over the past few years. Capybara got onto IGN’s Top 100 Modern Games list with both Sword and Sworcery and Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, and local news outlets exploded with the release of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, created by Ryan Creighton and drawn by his five-year-old-daughter Cassie. Games journalist Matthew Kumar, who caused a stir with his keynote at last year’s Gamercamp convention, is also expected to make a presentation.
Even as Guthrie continues to try to finish a successor album to Now More Than Ever that’s been in the works for the last four years, the gaming community just pulls him back in. He’s currently working on the music for a documentary called Indie Game: The Movie. “It focuses more on indie gaming as a personal expression of the developer and as an art form in general. It’s super fascinating.”
MIDSUMMER ROCKSHOWCASE, Thursday, June 30, 8 pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox Cinema 2.
