Music Artist: Blockhead

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that Blockhead is perhaps the greatest “mood” music I have ever had the pleasure of listening. My Werewolf players might recognize a song or two, as his stylings make up some of the background music I play during sessions. I have always believed that the sounds used during a session are as equally important as the story itself. Music is a wonderful spark to the imagination, often the necessary push for a player to leave our world to enter the World of Darkness or whatever game one might play. Great story elements can literally fall flat with players if the mood and setting are not in the right place. It is a careful game of "give and take" in which no Storyteller is perfect, but I pride myself in the thinking that I come pretty close to inspiring characters to play their best each session. Blockhead is not a conventional artist. Casual listeners might take his music and lump in into a techno section or perhaps the “pure moods, Enya, feel-good” category. It is synthetic by design but the output of his songs is hardly digitized. The closest artist I would even consider comparing him to is Moby, but even that is a stretch. He has a unique ability to take a harmlessly simple beat and twist it by breathing the surreal life of a city throughout. Blockhead actually finds insult to the mere claims of being a techno artist. In fact, he claims that his roots are in hip hop. At first I was surprised by this notion but the more I grew accustomed to his style the more it seemed to make sense. Like hip hop, his music is very raw and exposed. There's a simple beauty, and an equally harsh reality, to each of his songs. My personal favorite is "Insomniac Olympics." The song even hosts a fan-submitted "flash music video" of a gunfight gone wrong; the vid really hits the core feeling of the track. Most techno music is distorted; it is meant to immerse you in some robotic future that lies shrouded in fantasy. And while that style of music is great under certain circumstances, it does very little to encourage characterization in the WoD. Blockhead's music does quite the opposite; he puts the listener in the present-day streets, confronting a harsh world of drugs, sex, and sin. This is dark ambience at its best, an easy choice for a soundtrack to Werewolf the Forsaken or any other World of Darkness setting. "Insomniac Olympics" Music Video, via AlbinoBlackSheep. Blockhead’s Webpage, via NinjaTunes.