THE FIRST TIME someone invited me to a Slack Huddle - an audio call that happens inside the app - I didn't know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and moused away into the sad forest of a thousand open browser tabs on my computer.
Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my MacBook speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone-maybe a fake vibraphone?-with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud.
The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn't I hate it? On some instinctive level, I could tell - as I hunted through Chrome tabs one by one - that whatever circumstances normally produce elevator music had not produced this. This music wasn't canned; it was uncanny.
I'd scanned all my tabs twice, across two browser windows, before I realized the tune was coming from Slack. (By now an electric organ had replaced the vibraphone, and the sax seemed to be winking at how cheesy it was getting. Was this music... looking at me?) When I finally toggled the track into silence, I'm not going to say I felt bereft. But it wasn't long before I figured out how to play it again.
I went to the internet to see if anyone else had perked up at the Slack Huddle hold music. Sure enough, I found several uploads of it on YouTube, including one that looped it for 60 minutes. If anything, judging from comments, my reaction had been understated: "This has no right to be as good as it is." (211 likes.) "Absolute banger." (25 likes.) "So chill. After a long stressful discussion with my coworkers, I listen to this song to relax!" (59 likes.)
"Emerges from the silence like a beacon of hope, a buoy in the choppy seas of corporate tedium." (55 likes.) What was the deal with this music? A minimal amount of internet sleuthing turned up an answer: It wasn't a glitch in the simulation. It was a simulation from something called Glitch. In September 2021, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield responded to someone who was gushing over the hold music on Twitter. "Funny detail," he wrote: "That was composed/ performed by @DannyboySimmons for the failed MMO Glitch, the original project of the team that made Slack." I knew "MMO" meant "massively multiplayer online game," but the rest of Butterfield's tweet made no sense. He said the track had something to do with a "waiting quest" and a "Bureaucratic Arts skill."
I decided I needed to get in touch with this composer. I pictured @DannyboySimmons as some kind of game-music auteur with electronic blips in his veins and rings on all his fingers, which was intimidating to me - I'm a musician myself, but I mainly play bluegrass in people's backyards. Still, it was time to get off hold and try to get Simmons on the phone.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1711976062/articles/daTXOJXPo1712043618108/jGLQSkhF11712043765671.jpg]
WHEN DANNY SIMMONS finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn't hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn't looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from his old house in Toronto was piping into his ears.
Simmons is a lanky sound designer and - I truly didn't see this coming - a mainly bluegrass musician based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met back in college, when they were both in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy. ("I came in to replace the tall guy," Simmons explains.)
After graduation, Simmons became a gigging musician and Butterfield embarked on a failed career as a video game designer. Except Butterfield had a funny way of failing. He kept trying to build games and then accidentally building the internet instead. His first, Game Neverending, never ended up making much money but did include an infrastructure for sharing photos that became the basis for Flickr. (And Flickr― with its open API, its use of tags, its social networking functions - became the basis for much of the social web.)
Flickr sold to Yahoo for about $25 million in 2005, and a few years later Butterfield tried his sorry luck again, setting out to build a lighthearted, esoteric, and surreal new game: Glitch. To do it he got the old band back together, not just from Flickr but from Tall Guy Short Guy too. Simmons came aboard to write a score to invent a folk music for all the geographies in the game, and the requisite "bloops and bleeps and alerts."
In Glitch, as one of the game's developers describes ...
Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my MacBook speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone-maybe a fake vibraphone?-with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud.
The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn't I hate it? On some instinctive level, I could tell - as I hunted through Chrome tabs one by one - that whatever circumstances normally produce elevator music had not produced this. This music wasn't canned; it was uncanny.
I'd scanned all my tabs twice, across two browser windows, before I realized the tune was coming from Slack. (By now an electric organ had replaced the vibraphone, and the sax seemed to be winking at how cheesy it was getting. Was this music... looking at me?) When I finally toggled the track into silence, I'm not going to say I felt bereft. But it wasn't long before I figured out how to play it again.
I went to the internet to see if anyone else had perked up at the Slack Huddle hold music. Sure enough, I found several uploads of it on YouTube, including one that looped it for 60 minutes. If anything, judging from comments, my reaction had been understated: "This has no right to be as good as it is." (211 likes.) "Absolute banger." (25 likes.) "So chill. After a long stressful discussion with my coworkers, I listen to this song to relax!" (59 likes.)
"Emerges from the silence like a beacon of hope, a buoy in the choppy seas of corporate tedium." (55 likes.) What was the deal with this music? A minimal amount of internet sleuthing turned up an answer: It wasn't a glitch in the simulation. It was a simulation from something called Glitch. In September 2021, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield responded to someone who was gushing over the hold music on Twitter. "Funny detail," he wrote: "That was composed/ performed by @DannyboySimmons for the failed MMO Glitch, the original project of the team that made Slack." I knew "MMO" meant "massively multiplayer online game," but the rest of Butterfield's tweet made no sense. He said the track had something to do with a "waiting quest" and a "Bureaucratic Arts skill."
I decided I needed to get in touch with this composer. I pictured @DannyboySimmons as some kind of game-music auteur with electronic blips in his veins and rings on all his fingers, which was intimidating to me - I'm a musician myself, but I mainly play bluegrass in people's backyards. Still, it was time to get off hold and try to get Simmons on the phone.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1711976062/articles/daTXOJXPo1712043618108/jGLQSkhF11712043765671.jpg]
WHEN DANNY SIMMONS finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn't hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn't looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from his old house in Toronto was piping into his ears.
Simmons is a lanky sound designer and - I truly didn't see this coming - a mainly bluegrass musician based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met back in college, when they were both in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy. ("I came in to replace the tall guy," Simmons explains.)
After graduation, Simmons became a gigging musician and Butterfield embarked on a failed career as a video game designer. Except Butterfield had a funny way of failing. He kept trying to build games and then accidentally building the internet instead. His first, Game Neverending, never ended up making much money but did include an infrastructure for sharing photos that became the basis for Flickr. (And Flickr― with its open API, its use of tags, its social networking functions - became the basis for much of the social web.)
Flickr sold to Yahoo for about $25 million in 2005, and a few years later Butterfield tried his sorry luck again, setting out to build a lighthearted, esoteric, and surreal new game: Glitch. To do it he got the old band back together, not just from Flickr but from Tall Guy Short Guy too. Simmons came aboard to write a score to invent a folk music for all the geographies in the game, and the requisite "bloops and bleeps and alerts."
In Glitch, as one of the game's developers describes ...
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WIRED (Digital) - 1 Issue, May - June 2024