Retro Music Exclusive: Gamer, by Hounds
Gamer is an electronic music album available only at Retro. It is the ninth album from Hounds.
The Introduction to this album, which serves as its liner notes, and the two tracks (below) are free. The remainder is for full Retro subscribers. However, you can access free for a full week all 250+ Retro articles, including this Hounds LP and all others, by clicking the button below.
Hounds Music Library Index
Tracks, album links, and liner notes for the ten Hounds albums released so far can be found at the links below. Each Hounds album is different from the next in tone and beats, so if you find that you don’t respond to one, you may well respond to another!
Albums
October 28, 2024
Gamer (below)
June 2, 2024
Spycraft (album)
September 10, 2023
Network (album)
August 6, 2023
Piracy (album)
July 31, 2023
Spacewalk (album)
July 23, 2023
Midnight (album)
July 16, 2023
Fliers (album)
July 14, 2023
Transpecific (album)
Compilations
March 1, 2025
Second Conversion (forthcoming)
July 25, 2023
Conversion (compilation)
Gamer Liner Notes
Gamer is influenced by the past and future—and admittedly very little by the present.
It’s filled with chiptune, chillwave, lo-fi nineties bedroom pop, pagan dirges, noise-pop, post-rock, trance, and even hints of doom metal.
It features, as a bonus track, a melding of two other tracks that serves as the longest Hounds cut ever: “MMORPG,” which is fourteen minutes long and, like basically all of Gamer, is intended as a gaming-inspired audioscape you can live in.
In creating Gamer, I wanted to think—as frankly I’ve been trying to do with Hounds generally—about what the music of decades in the future might sound like, when we finally become fully immersed in the seeming inevitability of a post-rock and a post-hip-hop musical culture. In the same way Rock ceased to be the aural cornerstone of American popular music in the 2000s, the same fate likely awaits the equally well-won and hard-earned place Hip-Hop has had as the foundation for mainstream U.S. music.
That’s no judgment upon either Rock or Hip-Hop, of course, just an acknowledgment that popular music does a better job than—say—literary theory does of reinventing itself every thirty or forty years. By way of example, we’re now in the seventieth year of postmodernism in the American academy, and that’s no good; fortunately, music is less likely than almost any other art or intellectual pursuit to be such brazenly retrograde.
Metamodernism—the leading post-postmodern cultural philosophy, and coincidentally (or not so coincidentally) one of my primary research foci when I was in academia—will have its day in academia, just as rock and its many successors will give way to new modes fairly soon (keeping in mind that we’re only speaking of which aural mode constitutes the cultural dominant of an age; Rock and Hip-Hop will of course exist for decades, even centuries to come). Will what’s coming to popular music be anything at all like what listeners can hear on Gamer? Who knows.
One possible vision of the future is one in which anti-music microgenres are heavily influenced by niche digital subcultures in the same way that right now social media content on, for instance, TikTok seems to be headed that way. We can gradually see different content-creation substrata developing their own audio as well as video vibes; if that happens, I suspect gamers will drift off into their own sonic spaces every bit as much as the AI art crowd, food influencers, digital magicians, and Gen Z fashionistas.
I’ve been playing video games since I was six, and have been a video game journalist for about a decade. I even had the opportunity—I still can’t believe this happened—to teach gaming and the cultural theory that surrounds it for a few years at an R1 public flagship school, University of New Hampshire, before I retired from academia and became a full-time professional writer and artist. During my years as a professor, I found myself becoming only more and more invested in and engaged by the capacity of video games (which we don’t only think of as a visual medium but sometimes act as though it’s predominantly so) to create soundscapes as immersive as the visual wonders they offer.
What convinced me of this, I think, was chiptune. Was it merely nostalgia that caused me to feel that 8-bit, NES-style music simply worked not just as an accompaniment to a gaming experience but on its own? An interest in post-rock bands like Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky—two very different musical experiments, needless to say—provided a next step for me in my journey toward juxtaposing a lifelong love of video games and a somewhat more recent obsession with music (which didn’t really find me until I went to college in the 1990s).
Gamer is more or less the culmination of this trip for me.
When I first found music as an obsession in the nineties, it was—ironically—sixties music that did the trick for me. Some of my favorite tracks from those early years of loving that decade’s music, even before I started DJing on the radio as a specialist in the era in 1996, were sixties instrumentals. “Telstar” by The Tornadoes, “Let’s Go (Pony)” by The Routers, “Walk Don’t Run” by The Ventures, “Space Walk” by The Astros, “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams, “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat… it was an amazing period for songs without lyrics. Add that to my love of the Atari 2600 and the NES, my fascination with nineties indie-pop and even contemporary classical (e.g., Wim Mertens), and Gamer probably began to be born many, many years before I had the time or inclination to create it. My interest in poetics generally, this being the idea of crafting an aesthetic vision inductively based on everything you love and everything you are, is also a big part of all this.
So if you hear baroque electronic flourishes in the instrumentals of Hounds generally and on Gamer specifically, but also a tendency toward atonality and cacophony, know that it’s coming from a place of love and genuine passion—not nihilism. The songs of Gamer are supposed to be difficult spaces you can enter, muck about in and enjoy. I do really hope you find that to be your experience.
I suppose I should also mention that the title of the album is intended to do more than conjure up the nicer aspect of retro (as opposed to contemporary) gaming subcultures.
That is, I like the double-duty “gamer” does as both an avocation and an imperative.
On the one hand, one chooses to be a gamer; on the other, to the extent the word also signifies the ability to roll with life’s many punches, we really have no choice, do we?
Gamer was written during a very dark time in America, and probably for that reason a time in which I had more dark thoughts and anxiety than usual. So if you hear some of those moments in the music, and are put in mind by the album’s title of the way video games are both to be enjoyed and withstood—as a kind of endurance test requiring a gamer in the second sense of the word—you’re definitely hearing what I myself heard and was feeling as I made music in a presidential election year in the United States.
This will probably be the last new Hounds LP for a while—a forthcoming compilation, Second Conversion, that I’m quite excited about notwithstanding—I’m glad that it ends with the longest and I hope most complex soundscape in the Hounds catalogue, one that is capacious enough for us to imagine ourselves climbing inside it together and staying there for a long while.
{Note: A link to the subscriber-exclusive Gamer playlist at YouTube can be found at the very bottom of this article. I’m hoping to get most or even all Hounds tracks up on iTunes in the next year or two. See the Hounds index above to get early access to the entire Hounds oeuvre.}