Meet Gerard Roberts aka Kidkanevil
I recently met dj, producer 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!
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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