Meet Gerard Roberts aka Kidkanevil
I recently met producer, dj Gerard Roberts aka Kidkanevil through a happy accident when we posted an old vid online using sounds from an album he made with Daisuke Tanabe and absentmindedly forgot to credit the sound makers (quickly remedied!). Lol.
Luckily, based on his brilliant body of work over the years and his love of games and sound, he’s going to be giving a guest lecture and sound workshop this summer in our July games program! I asked him a few question in the lead-up to it.
When did your love of games start, do you remember your earliest experience and what initially got you hooked?
Growing up in the 90s there were certain cultural phenomena that really defined childhood then, home video games were something of a new and undeniable force. I think my earliest memory of video games was visiting my uncle's house who was an early gaming obsessive. He had a bunch of consoles from the time, but I was really of the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo generation, hence my slight obsession with 16bit music and sound.
In this program you'll be giving a workshop on sound for games. After all your experiences with game play and sound design, what would you say is the relationship between games and sound?
Video games have a lot of parallels (and differences of course) to film making in terms of music and sound, it's really an integral part to the experience, storytelling and artistry. But i think in video games, especially the early eras i'm most interested in, there are these bizarre, creative solutions that have great cultural and artistic merit.
I often think of Koji Kondo being tasked with creating the sound of Mario jumping for example, which is a really strange almost existential task, and in the process arguably changing the way popular culture audibly preserves such a thing. It's endlessly inspiring as an electronic musician.
Your album Bubble, which is based on an imagined psychedelic RPG, is brilliant. Did you create the world as you went along or what was your process?
Oh, thank you! I like exploring this space between the personal and the imagined, reality and beyond i guess. So my albums are generally a mix of what's happening in my life and some fantastical version of that. I made an album called My Littlle Ghost that was mostly written in Japan, so it has that experience at its core. But I made Bubble during the pandemic, so I was having to explore the world and find inspiration differently. I was playing a bunch of different Switch games so I felt a bit like I was spending a lot of my time jumping between dimensions or something. I remember my dreams at the time were all over the place! So the Bubble game was sort of this - living in your own bubble but the character has a portal to jump between different dimensions with different moods and vibes. So this was in my mind as the album started taking shape. So it's more of an internal creative conversation and framework than a fully planned out game as such, but there is a Bubble game in my mind for sure!
I just finished watching your ‘Live from Home’ vid from December 2022 and it is a masterpiece! Seriously, congratulations! Is there a story behind it?
Oh wow haha, thank you. I just recorded that on my phone during the pandemic for a bandcamp live performance around the Bubble album. I had this little visual synth called the Eyesy by Critter & Guitari, it's a browser-based editor using Python. You program scenes that can react to both audio and midi, so I created little mood pieces for each track. Each scene is connected to it's designated song, so then I can improvise freely and whatever tracks I play the visuals will match as intended. And then you have various parameters within that where you can mess about in real time either directly with the Eyesy's various controllers or using a midi controller.
I think I had everything being triggered by the MPD, so the laptop and Eyesy are actually off screen in the video. It takes a bit of time to set up and program but once it's done it's very fun to play around with. It's sort of simple and complicated at the same time I guess!
What role do visuals and animation play into the narratives in your mind? Is it a strong impulse inside you like with sound or do you prefer collaboration?
I grew up on films, anime and video games so I think my creative headspace is quite a visual place. That feeds directly into the music, and from there I will either explore that myself like with live from home or I'll seek out a visual partner who feels aligned with my work. I grew up in an era where music videos were really important and often great works in themselves, they'd often bring new dimensions to the music even.
Like the Coin Game song had this direct sonic and lyrical connection to arcade games, there's a legendary arcade called Mikado in Tokyo that was a perfect starting point. I knew the animator Ruff Mercy and the film maker Takcom were fans of each others work, and the featured rapper Nakamura Minami is such a great performer, if I could get all those elements and people together it would reflect the song perfectly which it did. So I think often the music is both created and presented with a degree of visual stimulation.
There were definitely several moments where it seemed like you and your machine were one. Do you feel like a cyborg at times? Do you see “cyborg” and “future of games” as related?
It's an interesting subject at the moment huh! I remember when Daft Punk announced their retirement and were like 'the last thing we want to be right now is robots'. I think there's a balance to find between the human and the technology, certainly in terms of art. Both with production and performance I want to feel locked in with the tools, but the emotion and drive is very human for sure. But pop culture has been wrestling with this forever huh.
When I was growing up cyborg/human hybrids were kinda cool like Ghost In The Shell, or there was an empathy for the robot's existential dilemma like Blade Runner. But I wonder if in the end Sonic The Hedgehog was actually the most accurate portrayal of where we find ourselves, nature (or in our case humanity) having to fight back and free itself from megalomaniacs and technological fascism.
I'm not sure I'm confident making predictions in these times, but I can see a future for gaming and the creative arts in general where the space for the human element becomes increasingly important, not less. But whether that is a niche space or not who knows!
Creating Alt Ctrl Games as Feminist Practice is a four-week intensive game design program running July 6–31, Berlin. Applications open!
Women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and others from under-represented communities in art and tech highly encouraged to apply! https://www.schoolofma.org/summer-2026/creating-alt-ctrl-as-feminist-art-practice
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