Kevin Sun

Accidental selfie ca. January 2021, sweatshirt gifted to me by Walter & Matt for my 29th birthday The first time I played Dark Souls  was probably in September 2020, deep pandemic and almost exactly midway through my first decade in New York. I had a COVID pod with my triomates, Walter Stinson and Matt Honor, and I distinctly remember them putting the controller in my hands and saying, "You have to play this." They had alluded to the major parallel between the Souls games and my music at the time, namely the supposedly punishing difficulty level, and I quickly found myself pulled into the thrall of interactive entertainment in a way I hadn't felt since I was a pre-teen.¹ It's been years since that first intoxicating taste of Souls , and although I've wanted to write about the series and jazz for years, I never got around to committing many of my thoughts on the two  until now.  In retrospect, I think my fondness for the original installment, my earliest exposu...

Back in November, I played Close Up NYC with both the bands from Quartets . Earlier that night, I also spoke with fellow saxophonist and D'Addario rep Mike Talento at the club for a video interview promoting the record and also discussing my preference for D'Addario's synthetic VENN reed . The full interview with clips from that night's show is on YouTube , and I'm sharing an AI generated transcript with hyperlinks below: Introduction My name is Kevin Sun, and I play the tenor saxophone. We are at Close Up in New York City, and tonight I'm celebrating the release of my newest album, Quartets .  Beginnings I began playing the tenor saxophone when I was 10 years old in fourth grade [ ed:  actually, I started on alto in fourth grade; totally misspoke here, but I switched primarily to tenor in the seventh grade, if I remember correctly]. My parents chose the saxophone because they saw Bill Clinton play it on TV , and they decided I should try it.  Being a profes...

Hidetaka Miyazaki The 2011 FromSoftware video game Dark Souls  was recently awarded the seemingly hyperbolic title "Ultimate Game of All Time" at the 2021 Golden Joystick Awards , which started in 1983 and is the second-oldest video game award ceremony of its kind. There's no end to the essays and video tributes to the game available online, not to mention endless lore exegesis and detailed design analysis, but having entered the "Soulsborne" universe during the pandemic, I'm thoroughly and continually awed by the immersive design work of mastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki and his colleagues at FromSoft. Digging into the mechanics of these games feels like studying James Joyces's Ulysses  or mid-later period Coltrane; the level of interconnected detail, mystery, and implication is profound. So, how do you come up with and implement a (series of) games that push the mechanical and storytelling boundaries of the medium? There's a central vision, of course,...