Yet these are often sophisticated and complex compositions. They’re designed at first provide stimulating play, but there’s artistic meat there nonetheless. It’s a hyper mix of classical, breakcore, bubblegum pop, and progressive rock.

Again, I’m celebrating Dragon Con with a playlist of phonk, the coolest nerd music on the market today. This is the realm of the self-proclaimed prodigies, of autodidacts and blue-collar futurists. Welcome to the new age of fingerless gloves, the soundtrack to the getaway drive.

Typical of a great researcher, the songs and composers Jon Bois finds are ripe for reappraisal. These are great songs by massively prolific composers who never got to get their due, master songwriters who pumped out track after track for the good of art and storytelling at large.

Music was baked into the franchise from the beginning, but Ocarina of Time was the game that fully embraced it as part of the world and mythos. Not many games revolve around an ancient wind instrument, and in later entries, players can noodle on guitars, bagpipes, bongos, and even a conductor’s baton.

Today’s playlist was inspired by Dragon Con. I packed it full of drift phonk, a newer genre of electronic music born from phonk, a.k.a. chopped-and-screwed hip hop that takes old-school Memphis rap samples, compresses them until their flat as a tin pancake, and buries them beneath distorted 808s and lo-fi trap rhythms.

Musica Universalis is a cosmological concept which posits that the movements of the planets are musical. You could map their kinetics and relational mechanics onto patterns of frequency and hear them sing.

Today, I lie buoyant on my summer sheets, television screen paused on the video game I just can't stop playing. Its pause gives me a little break from dying—at the hands of giant insects; in puddles bubbling with acid; on the spikes placed in pits laid by deranged urban planners.

I'm on vacation and on a budget, which of course means I've been playing hours and hours of The Legend of Zelda (write what you know).