EXT.TMP “Toggle God Mode” (Bedlam Tapes)




IF – and that’s a fully capital “IF” – you want your sound rendered in three-dimensional visual accompaniment, look no further than ext.tmp, the electronic artist masquerading as a computer file (probably one teeming with viruses). Bedlam Tapes, out of Germany, has somehow seen the need to unleash TOGGLE GOD MODE into the world, its synthetic TRON-esque landscapes pixelating before your very eyes as grids beget geometric forms, which take on size, contour, and texture before being imbued with life and set on constant cosmic gif-fery. You hear TOGGLE GOD MODE, and these things appear, as if the music itself was some sort of … Master Control Program? Regardless, IF fully becomes WHEN at this point, because once you enter this terrain, there is absolutely no returning from it, and do you want to? I mean, this video for “sidable_spectator” is like David Lynch on MS Paint after playing waaaay too many hours of MARBLE MADNESS on the NES. These visuals have to mean something, but what? We hover, we roll, we splash – but why? Our answers are not forthcoming from ext.tmp, but instead we are thrust ever further into the fantastic realm imagined only by the circuits of a computer. Kind of like a holodeck on the ENTERPRISE if the ENTERPRISE was fully assimilated by the Borg, but the Borg were all, like, tripping balls big time and decided to collectively major in graphic design. But there’s the paradox: we all know the Borg is a collective, they don’t go to college – they ALREADY know how to make this zany stuff! Still, ext.tmp remains, exists, creates, and we are powerless to resist against ext.tmp’s infinite electronic charms. Pulses and melodies earworm into your cerebral cortex and become part of your nervous system, engendering responses that you never knew you could perform, at speeds you never imagined your body could reach. And this is all before TOGGLE GOD MODE becomes the new normal – at first you’re merely at a stage of rapid and advanced change, and when you no longer sense the intricacies of ext.tmp’s alterations, once they’ve fully become part of you, that’s when you ascend. You’re probably asking, What do you mean ascend, to where? I dunno, man, I’m just telling you what I’ve seen with my own eyes. People change, then ascend. I imagine there’s some spherical Lynchian globule involved.

Bedlam Tapes
Rendering Portfolio

--Ryan Masteller