Jason Cox’s career as one-man-band Xoc hit the big time in August last year when his debut - SMW, a cover of the entire Super Mario World soundtrack done using accordion, acoustic guitars, antique pickaxe, asscheeks, banjo, bike horn, cabasa, Canon Powershot, ceramic toilet mug, children’s drum set, claves, coconut thumb piano, cowbells, cuatro, doublespeed acoustic guitar, doublespeed banjo, doublespeed guitars, drum set, drum sticks, electric bass guitar (Yamaha RBX200), electric guitars, finger cymbals, gooseneck mic stand, handclaps, handmade maracas, jam block, jew’s harp, Korg MS2000B synth, lap steel guitar, maracas, matchbook, melodion, ocarina, pennywhistle, pump organ, PSS-270 keyboard, refrigerator door, ribbon crasher, Roland Groovebox, rototom brace, school bell, shakers, slide whistle, sportshorn, tacklebox, tambourines, triangle, turkey locator, Tyco Hot Lixx, ukelele, upright bass, violin, vocals, woodblock, wood flute, Wurlitzer electric piano, and xylophone - appeared in Edge Magazine who said that “every track is both a pop gem and a testament to the lasting appeal of [Koji] Kondo’s compositions and XOC’s one-man-band prowess”.

8 months later, the album -available for free on the Internet Archive - has clocked up in excess of 82,000 downloads, which is more than 60,000 more than any other open source audio.

Jason’s next project as Xoc was Videogame: The Movie: The Game: The Cover Album, an double album of covers and originals from a supposed pirate NES game, which, in turn was based upon a supposed movie from 1984 starring Jonathan Brandis, Jill Bennett and Ed Flanders. The concept features an 1,800 word summary, including the history of the movie, it’s producers, and reveals that “all three of the film’s stars would eventually go on to commit suicide”. It’s a mix of fact and fiction that goes into such depth it beggars the senses.

Again, Xoc was featured by Edge, this time on their website, where they called this work a ” twisted conceptual madness”, and Xoc’s “magnum opus”.

Over the period of just over a month, Little Mathletics spoke to Jason about SMW, Videogame: The Movie: The Game: The Cover Album and a myriad of other topics, all through the magic of email.

I guess the obvious lead in question is, how did you come up with an idea like this? I realise it was for a competition, but what you’ve done goes far, far beyond what was asked for.

Ha ha. Well, let’s see… The contest called for a fictional game scenario, and I really couldn’t come up with an original idea. Most video games fall into genres, and there are pretty consistent aspects to all these formats. Like, NES side-scrollers have power-ups, exponentially harder levels, minibosses and an end boss, etc. So I figured that any concept I came up with was going to be derivative anyway, so why not take the ripoff to the furthest extreme and just rip off everything?

The part about the movie didn’t really need to exist, I guess. It doesn’t explain the game any further, that’s for sure! The story of the film and the game was different when I started writing, too. Originally, the circumstances involving the movie and illegally produced game were much more sinister… which is why I picked three actors that really committed suicide. The original story was going to infer that they were actually murdered over some kind of secret linked to the game and/or movie. But that idea never really materialized, so at the end it just says, “they went on to commit suicide.” It’s kind of an off-hand comment, like a bad joke, until you realize that they really did. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve changed that part.

I did a lot of online research for the story part, primarily with IMDB and Wikipedia. A lot of arbitrary elements (like Onoda Hiroo as a boss) came from surfing through Wikipedia.

Are you worried that people might take this the wrong way? Not only in terms of thinking it (and the part where “Super Mario Bros. is reworked into a skewed depiction of one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history, at a circus in Hartford, Connecticut in 1944“) bad taste, but also in terms of taking it seriously?

I’m not really worried, mainly because the album was intended for a contest at The Shizz, and it’s a free download. If I were making a CD to sell to anybody that wanted to buy it, then maybe I’d worry. But those references are pretty obscure. And “The Hartford Circus Fire” is just such a great title. It reminds me of a lot of Tom Waits imagery–unfortunately, it really happened.

In your summary of the idea, you’ve got a number of people listed who don’t actually exist, though you’ve mentioned elsewhere that these are anagrams. What’s your obsession with them?

It’s probably about time that I made another donation to the anagram server at wordsmith.org , because I’m on there all the time! I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some kind of anagram genius, because I’m not–and neither is anyone else I know. I’ve tried doing it by hand, and it’s ridiculous! I like anagrams because you’ll sometimes get something significant from them (”the eyes” = “they see”, “Clint Eastwood” = “Old West Action”, etc.), but more often you get something completely unexpected. I used anagrams to generate fictitious names in the hopes that someday, some anagram enthusiast will figure out what it really means, and they’re pretty much the only person who will get this exclusive joke. But since you asked…

“Holden Hue-Giacomo” is an anagram of, and a tribute to, Michael O’Donoghue. He was once quoted as saying, “The funniest thing to me is a movie producer doing Quaaludes, falling asleep in his hot tub and parboiling. I don’t know if it has ever actually happened, but the idea is sure humorous to me.” So that’s what that whole bit means.

Ethan Mesial and Natalie Mesh are both anagrams for “Alan Smithee“, a pseudonym “used between 1968 and 1999 by Hollywood film directors who wanted to be dissociated from a film for which they no longer wanted credit.” Once again, thanks to Wikipedia.

What’s your musical background?

I started playing drums maybe twenty years ago, taking lessons, playing recitals, the whole thing. I picked up guitar and keyboard on my own in the early nineties. I played drums in a bunch of local bands, most recently with Las Pesadillas. I still play guitar for a grind/punk band called KnifeThruHead.

I’ve been writing and recording stuff at home for about twelve years now–most of it is just ghastly. I always adhered to the belief that quantity = quality: the more things you finish, the more likely there’s going to be something worthwhile hidden among the crap. I don’t really spend excessive amounts of time on perfecting things.

That’s a very Ween-like philosophy.

That’s what really got me into the 4-track aesthetic–when I heard Pure Guava for the first time. I read a Dean Ween interview in Tape Op magazine years later where he spelled out the quantity-equals-quality method, which was really gratifying. I filled up about 50 cassettes with home recordings, which I could boil down to maybe an hour-long CD.

What’s your gaming history?

The first game I remember enjoying was Yar’s Revenge. I never owned an Atari, but practically everyone I knew did. My uncle had an Intellivision, and Thunder Castle and Bump ‘n’ Jump were probably my favorites on that one. The first system I owned was a Colecovision, with Donkey Kong Jr., Tapper, and whatever the Smurf game was called. Then the NES came out, and the only games I remember owning (in the possessive sense, not “p0wned”) were 3-D Worldrunner, Life Force, Jaws, Metroid, and Kid Niki. I didn’t buy another system until GameCube came out, and that was only to play the new Metroid games.

So how did you become so familiar with the Super Mario World soundtrack?

The only reason I didn’t buy any systems from 1986-2002 is because I really didn’t have to. Most of my friends are gamers, and just like the days of Atari, many of them had whatever was popular at the time. One friend always bought Sega systems, another was a SNES/N64 loyalist, etc. One of my friends still has practically every popular system (from Turbografix to Xbox), hooked up to one TV, right now! So there was never any real need for me to buy them. I’m a huge Metroid fan, so when Prime came out, no one wanted to lend me their GameCube for an extended period of time, so that’s why I had to buy one.

I discovered emulators sometime in 2000, and that was it. So since then I’ve been learning about all the games I never played in my youth - Kirby is a good example.

I just remembered, I briefly owned a Gameboy! I had Tetris and Super Mario Land. Some dickhead stole it when I brought it to school.

When did you first begin to notice music in games?

In the late eighties, I never really thought of game music as music in its own right. It seems so obvious now, but if there were any videogame cover bands back then, they apparently weren’t very popular.

One of my favorite bands has always been Mr. Bungle, and there’s a widely distributed bootleg from a show in Berkeley in 1991 where they play a medley of Nintendo songs. By today’s standards, it’s inaccurate and sloppy, but at the time it was pretty unique.

I assume you’re a Fantômas fan too?

Totally! I’m proud as hell to say my first Bungle show was on the Disco Volante tour, at the Fillmore West. Me and my friends were somehow expecting “Squeeze Me Macaroni” and all that shit, and judging by the obnoxious assholes in the crowd, so was everyone else. It was quite an eye-opener! Melt-Banana opened the show, and joined Bungle for their encore–which was like 20 minutes of noise, followed by a gentle Japanese (I think) ballad.

I’m really making an effort to cure myself of the “I was there” old man bullshit, honestly. But I saw one of the first Fantômas shows! Ha ha. It was pretty funny–all the idiots in the crowd were Slayer fans, they hated it. I was watching these metalhead burnouts get excited every 10 seconds when they heard something that sounded like Slayer, they’d bounce up and down and smile, then the music would take a dramatic turn, and they’d frown and heckle them.

What was your first attempt to play music from a game?

I think my first attempt at a game cover would be Pac-Man on guitar. Here’s the winning formula: you play that horrible 4-note fanfare from the Atari version, then mute all the strings high up on the neck while strumming up and down (to simulate “pellet chomping”, I guess). Then abruptly stop and play four continuous glissandos up the high E string to represent the Atari “you died” sound - or you can play the glissandos going down, followed by a quick WAK-WAK on the muted strings, to simulate the arcade version. Then repeat the horrible fanfare, and take a bow.

What bands would you say you’re influenced by?

Ween, Zappa, the Residents, and John Zorn are some of my absolute favorites. But as for direct influence, I guess it depends on the genre. Let’s see… in the generalized category of “harder stuff”, I like Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Melvins, A.C., Spazz, Gwar, and recently I got into an Asian grindcore band called Fallen World. But I also like the last couple Cocteau Twins albums quite a bit. My own “regular” songwriting is mostly influenced by the Frank Black / Pixies / Breeders lineage, along with They Might Be Giants and Steely Dan. Oh, and Prince. Really, don’t get me started, I’ll be listing bands all day.

And the blindingly obvious one; what game music composers do you admire?

I won’t even talk about Koji Kondo, because it ought to go without saying. The same goes for Tanaka Hirokazu. I mean, anybody who doesn’t acknowledge those two guys as the absolute pillars in the game music community is just rebelling for rebellion’s sake. Not that I’ve actually heard anyone disparaging their work, I’m just making a point.

And whoever did the music for Kirby’s Adventure ought to be famous enough that I could name them right now.

Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa did the music for Kirby’s Adventure. Ishikawa has worked pretty much exclusively on Kirby games, and Ando has recently done the Super Smash Bros. series.

Then they are officially in my personal Hall of Awesome. Someone once said that hearing Steely Dan for the first time was like hearing “the Beatles with jazz chords,” and I equate that with the Kirby music. I guess Super Mario Bros would be the Beatles in this context. Kirby music is a little more sophisticated.

You’ve mentioned being a fan of Dave Wise’s work in the past, is that something you’d like to work on? Wizards & Warriors is one of my personal favourite soundtracks…

David Wise is a personal favorite. I found his name while searching for credits for NES songs I’d covered, and I found out he did a bunch of them! He did R.C. Pro-Am, Marble Madness, A Nightmare on Elm Street …the list goes on. He’s more famous for his later work in the Donkey Kong Country games, but I think his score for the NES Beetlejuice music is some of the best game music, ever. The game itself, while ambitious, is really a piece of shit. Even using save states, I found it difficult and frustrating. Which is unfortunate, since the music is intricate, well-written, and just plain weird. It makes me wonder how the process works; do they explain the levels to the composer, who writes the music before the game is finished? Because if he wrote the music after he played the game, then the guy is a total stud for putting the effort in to help polish the turd.

I don’t want to tip my hand here, but the next album - which is already complete, by the way…I know, I’m lazy - will feature, among other things, ALMOST the entire soundtrack to the Beetlejuice game.

And in regards to Wizards & Warriors… I really never played that game, although I’m familiar with some of the themes. I’ll have to check it out again.

The article on NES music on Wikipedia has a part where it talks about NES games having soundtracks reminiscent of “baroque” sensiblities, and Wise’s work on that game is the first thing I think of. The second thing I think of is…….pfffft….wankers.

Hahaha. I don’t have the education for it, but it seems like baroque is the top 40 of classical music; or at least the stuff that translates easiest into pop music. Like the way the music from Gauntlet turned into “The Final Countdown” by Europe . Or was it the other way round? There’s some similarities in the tune. And as it turns out, they both came out the same year, so I’m not sure who influenced who.

Judging by the fact that you’ve covered her work, I’m guessing you’re a fan of Miki Higashino too?

I guess I am! Ha. Life Force is my favorite out of all those types of games. I always preferred it over Gradius because of the brains and intestines and skulls and stuff in the arcade version. I’m not really sure what the story on the NES version is supposed to be, though. OK, you’re in someone’s colon shooting tumors, then there’s the brain with arms… then, later, you’re in an Egyptian tomb?

About the SMW album, you’ve now achieved over 82,000 downloads. That’s enough for a platinum album in Australia . How does that feel?

It makes me feel like I should’ve charged for it from the beginning! Ha ha. Really, it feels fantastic. I used to check the page every day to watch the little numbers go up.

And it made me believe that the internet might actually revitalize the do-it-yourself approach after all. It seems so much more meaningful to have small communities of people that genuinely respect each others’ work, than to struggle for some imagined mainstream acceptance. And it would be one thing if we downloaded and bought each others’ MP3s and CDRs just for mutual support, but I actually love the music people are making! That direct contact is more significant and encouraging, and it’s really the way things ought to go. “Internet celebrity” should eventually lose its negative implication, because we’re all equal here. Remember–you, too, are on the internet!

How do you feel about the support from Edge Magazine?

I wasn’t familiar with the popularity of the magazine (or with any gaming magazines, for that matter; I’m pretty much out of the loop), but it scared the hell out of me at first. There’s something terrifying about success for some people, and to top it off, it was a magazine from an entirely different country! But I got over it. I’m stunned and deeply flattered.

Is there something in particular that you would attribute SMW’s success to? I suspect its “organic” feeling might have something to do with it, but that might just be me.

I guess that’s part of it, but I think it’s mostly the source material. So many people played that game, and many (including myself) would count it among the greatest videogames of all time. And as far as I knew, no one had attempted to do every bit of music from the game, all in one place. So there’s almost a built-in audience there.

The organic/acoustic approach came naturally, simply because I’m not a hotshit guitar player. There are some “real” guitarists doing game music online, not to mention the for-all-intents-and-purposes-FIRST-game-band Minibosses, who already had the dual guitar Iron Maiden approach covered. Grant Henry’s Metroid Metal project is another well-known example of someone who can play his ass off in the Nintendo vein. I figured that I wouldn’t make it in a guitar-based, heavy style, so I went for weirdness.

That would be a result of your influences too, though.

In the strictest sense, the fact that I avoided the metal guitar approach would mean I was influenced by them too! But I know what you mean. I would say the production style alone is a hybrid of the low-rent early Ween home recording style, and an attempt at Dan Rathbun’s dry, organic approach with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh. Have you heard of Uz Jsme Doma? Their earlier albums, while superb in composition, sound seriously lacking in production value in comparison to the latest two that Rathbun produced. Ears is one of the greatest rock albums ever made. There, I said it.

Do you read the reviews on the Archive? Some of them are great:

“Subject: god
are you? because i worship you. are you even real? i think you are mr.Shigeru myamoto in disguise
actually, and you are doing this in aid of selling copies of old games.
well, you got me to buy them.
thnx XOC for making my life worthwhile!”

How do you take something like that? I mean, “thnx for making my life worthwhile”? And being asked to do “all of the tunes from other classics”? Or being asked to tour Mexico ?

It makes me wish I had put a website up sooner. I also wish that there was an option on Archive.org to list e-mail addresses in the comments, because I’ve wanted to contact all those people this whole time!

I guess it’s hard not to want to contact someone who refers to you as “God”.

What do you say to that? “Thanks”? How about “God commands you to scale back on the hyperbole”?

What about your other bands? How serious are you about your various projects?

I’m just as serious about all of the solo projects as I am with the Xoc stuff. I’d like to just combine all of it under a single name, but it’s a little too schizophrenic. Recreational Episiotomy is a good example, because it’s for an entirely different demographic. It’s doubtful that casual listeners of SMW will like Recreational Episiotomy. But I think it’s good, it’s fun to record…and I have hundreds of songs completed. Hopefully you’ll hear them soon!

Do you intend to just continue to put songs up on your site?

SMW was originally planned as a 3-inch CD release. But a couple of things happened: first of all, it ran over the maximum time allotment for a 3-inch CD. And secondly, I was a little worried about getting sued. The clearest answer I’ve heard regarding higher-profile bands like The Minibosses and The Advantage is that “Nintendo usually looks the other way.” But back then, I decided it would just be easier to put it up for free download, to avoid all kinds of issues.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop putting up songs for free, if that’s what you mean. If I’m going to sell a CD, I might as well put up at least half the songs for free. If that’s enough for you, that’s awesome, because you got it free! If it’s not, and you buy a disc, then I earned your money.

Of course, this is a futile argument, since I haven’t yet expended the cash and effort to pressing CDs. But soon, I swear!

I think it’s through places like the Archive that the do-it-yourself ethic survives at it’s most pure. And I guess, as much as I don’t like the majority of what’s on there (no offense to you of course) MySpace is also very important in this.

Both of those sites really deserve credit for their hosting efforts. It’s really transforming the music scene in a positive way, I think. Even if much of the music on MySpace is crap (in our opinion), that’s no different than the music scene in real life, except that online, it’s a level playing field. Even if you make a page of anti-music just to make a statement about how MySpace will host anything, it’s still a statement, and MySpace is still hosting it. It’s giving opportunities to a lot of smartasses that otherwise wouldn’t have the resources, determination, or even inclination to go a traditional route (playing shows at dive bars for years, for example). Making a living by selling CDRs to people online is unlikely, but possible. That will probably replace the “record executive magically appears with a contract and a bag of money for the starving musician” dream, I guess.

Well, sure, but it’s not as romantic, is it?

I think the future is going to hold even less romance (chemical, or otherwise…pheewwwwwww) than people think. “Romance” is a very poisonous mental construct, whereas “optimism”, in the DEVO sense, is going to be a necessity. The mutants are doing it for themselves, so to speak.

Not to forget Ween’s Craters of the Sac too…

Ha ha, exactly. They took it to the people big time with that one. That was an electronic teabagging.

Chocodog seems (among other web-based cottage industries), to me, to be the ideal. I don’t have any real aspirations beyond a situation like that, for any of my projects.

How do you feel about www.ocremix.org ? Is there a reason you’ve not put anything up there?

I haven’t really delved too deep into that community. From what I can tell, it’s impeccably produced stuff. You could tell me it was the John Williams score for some blockbuster movie and I’d believe it. I’m completely lost when it gets to that Final Fantasy type stuff though, since I’ve never been interested in those types of games. Most of what I’ve heard from OCRemix would fall into the category of “stuff I’d listen to and enjoy, but I wouldn’t attempt myself.” There’s a lot of that in my personal music collection, actually.

But the main thing is, I try to avoid “adding” anything to any of this music. I like maybe playing something in a different style, or tempo, but I would never compose an original countermelody to an existing score. It’s hard to explain, because I love stuff like Metroid Metal, which is very expressive, has a lot of original material mixed in. I love it, but it’s just not something that would come naturally to me to create. Bands like the Minibosses and the Advantage are pretty strict about accuracy. “This has to be the one with all the right notes in it,” as Zappa said. So as far as OCRemix goes, those guys seem like they’re in a completely different league.

On the Videogame: The Movie site, the pictures are credited to QC Archives? What’s that meant to mean? Another hidden message?

QC = Questionable Concepts. It’s a name Damian Sol and I thought up (another infinitely talented little fucker, he played violin in Las Pesadillas with me). We never got around to using it as a legal company name, so I used it for my Cafepress store. I think we might use it in the future as the name of an online music store.

I meant to ask you about that…do you get many orders? And you just press stuff up as you get the orders, I assume. I mean, you don’t have a box of Xoc g-strings in your cupboard…do you?

At Cafepress, you upload your images, and assign it to their selection of merchandise. You can then raise the price over their base price, and if someone buys it, you collect the difference. And yeah, things are only manufactured if someone orders it. They offer stores for free, where you can add a design to one of each of their products; or you can pay a monthly fee, and add as many designs as you want to any number of their products.

I pay the monthly fee, and virtually NOBODY orders anything. Even if they did, I only mark up the merchandise a penny (this is just so their purchase appears on the sales report), since the base prices are already pretty goddamn expensive. So the whole thing is actually losing me money every month. But I just do it as an artistic exercise, because I find it fun to design stuff and see how it might look if I shelled out eight bucks on a thong.

And for the future, I know you’ve mentioned a Metroid album a few times; when do you see that coming out?

There’s a few things finished, although I’d like to re-record most of the songs you might’ve heard already. There’s about twenty pieces from various Metroid games I plan to cover. If it makes it to a CD release, then I’ll put the original concept online as a free EP: an accordion-only Metroid cover album (which Nate Jahnke of metroid2002.com titled “Metroid Maligned”), which is about “specialty item” as it gets.

Visit Jason Cox’s site here, and buy an Xoc g-string while you’re there.