Interactive literature has been around for a while now in one guise or another: Cortazar's Hopscotch, Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, heck, even those Choose Your Own Adventure novels from when you were a kid; I mean, I wouldn't count those as literature necessarily, but you get my drift. However, musically, I don't think I've yet run across an album that is interactive in quite the way those novels are, where the way the album sounds is dependent upon the person playing it. Snakes and Ladders isn't exactly like that either, but it's a step in the right direction. The concept behind the album is that the 99 songs (and one virtual song, whatever that means) correspond to the squares on a Snakes and Ladders board, conveniently included with the album (as well as a miniature die inside the plastic of the case) and that each song is to accompany a move on the board therefore making each listening experience a new one.
Of course, just as one can read Hopscotch without the extra chapters, one can listen to this as a straightforward album. I have to admit, I didn't feel inclined to play the game with anyone, and therefore never discovered what it may sound like as piecemeal accompaniment. That may be a drawback of the design; I don't know many people my age that really want to engage in a game of Snakes and Ladders, although part of the concept may be the recapturing of youth especially with the numerous reinterpretations of children's songs found peppered throughout the 99 tracks. Regardless, it works both ways, as it was intended and as a standard album, although I must say that the children's songs do tend to get annoying.
Musically, the album almost seems like an hour-long rendition of They Might Be Giant's "Fingertips," but really there's much more to this than TMBG-type pseudo-novelty songs including bits of dialogue, noise collages, distorted childhood songs and 3rd grade music class favorites, bits of electronic music and modern composition, pop songs, pastiches, and so on. Obviously the variety of styles is supposed to play to the concept, and while I don't think that even the most creative person could give personality to a square on as bare a board game as this, I'm sure the infinite intermingling is the aim—while I haven't done the math, in theory, a game of Snakes and Ladders could go on infinitely long, thereby possibly creating the first eternal album, giving Queneau himself a run for his money, that is, until someone balks at the aleatory nature of Slaw's enterprise and creates a musical version of Cent Mille Millards de Poemes.
|
