Serve me through the wall
Lofi music exists behind a wall. Someone else is playing it, streaming it, studying/relaxing to it. Nobody knows what they’re listening to, but they know the girl flipping pages on a rainy night and the inebriated alien lounging in a trashed apartment. We can tune in or out whenever we need. The lofi beats will always be there, unchanging, the ambient fuzz of vinyl crackle and electric drums softly playing as the servers melt.
I find lofi a remarkably melancholy genre for how often it’s used as background noise. The unplaceable nostalgia fills me with a listless exhaustion, grappling for sentiment where there is none. This isn’t a criticism of lofi, just an unremarked upon feature. In merging the layered atmosphere of shoegaze and the propulsion of hiphop, lofi is always moving fast to nowhere. It is a cocktail of cultural ennui; sounds of the outside world disentangled from their complexities and traumas. We are all laughing and crying and working and relaxing and waiting for a track change that never comes.
Ping pong is a natural companion to lofi. It is a goofy non-sport with a high skill ceiling; a thrift store golem and beer pong degenerate that’s always there but never arrived. Nobody plays ping pong, ping pong simply happens, or tries to happen. It's an excuse to share a space and fill the silence; an understated gift to awkward friendships and your college crush. I am always willing to play ping pong. It is effortless, even and because we are all terrible.
Lofi Ping Pong (Calvares, 2019) initially presents as a similarly low-impact, ambient affair. It could be the new background to a lofi livestream, crisp and dirty pixel art moving in time to a warped beat. But in the space between rounds comes the oft absent exhale. The game pauses on an empty train, a deserted court, a station with exits but no labels. Ambiguous, disbelieving, strained text messages appear on our phone. Animal masked opponents punctuate matches with earnest cries for help. So much pain held back by the metronomic snap of plastic on wood. We don’t even know each other’s face.
All these cryptic messages and blank spaces make it easy to over read Lofi Ping Pong. But like lofi and ping pong it is not the specifics but what they surround that makes them compelling. Lofi Ping Pong reflects what you bring to it, shattered into a hundred mirror images twisting under the anxieties of our shared isolation. I don’t need the possum to tell me why they’re hurting, I can’t solve their problems. It is enough to share this pocket of time, this silly game on an abandoned rooftop. Once more, before it gets cold.
What's so powerful about Lofi Ping Pong is how it understands its subject. It is a sad and challenging game wrapped in soft textures; less ping pong sim than twitchy rhythm game. Unlike its inspiration, here we can’t be wholly insulated. Our ironic detachment breaks every time we miss a beat, thrust back into consciousness and the glow of our monitor. It can be hypnotic but even played perfectly, rounds last less than a minute. We will always return to the train, to the station, to the world outside the game. Lofi Ping Pong provides a beautiful and brief escape, but knows eventually we have to wake up.
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