The marriage of music and CD-R technology will never be fully consummated until developers, artists, and record companies collectively seek to create (and consumers begin to demand) a new kind of content, one native to the medium, rather than simply slapping pre-existing video, photos, and other artifacts into a game-like environment. With
Gingerbread Man, San Francisco's notorious experimental music combo
the Residents demonstrate one radical extreme of the artistic/technological spectrum. After wetting their feet with the decidedly uncentered
Freak Show -- neither a game nor a music title, but a multimedia universe all unto itself -- the group applied that idea to one of its own music projects. On an audio CD player,
Gingerbread Man offers ten odd, thematically linked musical vignettes by the anonymous group, totaling some 37 minutes. But the real mind-expanding experience comes from plugging this doughboy into your computer's CD-R drive. In a manner similar to Ebenenezer Scrooge's final speechless phantom guide in A Christmas Carol, the program's "gingerbread man" character escorts you through the cortexes of nine hapless protagonists, ranging from "The Dying Oilman" and "The Confused Transsexual" to "The Sold-Out Artist" and "The Aging Musician." These lost souls are trapped on some inner voyage of the damned and, as you explore you are given various cryptic visual and sound byte clues to their past that may (or may not) serve to explain their current torment. The disc's haunting, repetitive theme music echoes throughout the scenarios whenever the grim gingerbread man appears encrusted with hieroglyphs, a baked-good-from-hell roaming the computer screen on a relentless treadmill acting as the audiovisual representation of the numbing futility that life can sometimes represent. This somewhat unnerving, disturbing experience is not the thing to spend a lot of time with alone late at night (if you want to get any sleep afterwards) or if you already border on manic depressive. Visitors can access
Gingerbread Man in leisure mode, which allows the passive viewing of a predetermined multimedia track that accompanies the songs in sequence. An extra dimension of the surreal is added by going "interactive," where every mouse or keyboard click generates seemingly random, unpredictable results. In fact,
Gingerbread Man never seems to play exactly the same way twice. One fault here, of the variety that movie critics often point out, is the lack of sympathetic characters. Each is pathetic and/or revolting, which doesn't exactly draw you enthusiastically back to enjoy their company. Such facile concessions are not expected from
the Residents, however, and none are offered.
Gingerbread Man is not the sort of title that will bring music CD-Rs to the masses -- that was never its intent -- but it certainly stands to develop a strong cult following.