Back in 2003 a demoscene pro­ducer viznut from a group PWP man­aged to cre­ate a cou­ple of very nice Com­modore VIC-20 demos for our plea­sure. They are called Robotic War­rior and Robotic Lib­er­a­tion. Fuck­ing great!

Just try them out totally drunk! The sec­ond one is like a sequel to the first okay?

“Robotic War­rior is a single-loading VIC-20 demo fea­tur­ing a voice syn­the­sizer and an apoc­a­lyp­tic story about robots turn­ing against their cre­ators. The tech­ni­cal catch, of course, was the voice syn­the­sizer, which was used to sing out the text of the story. The sound-related code and data became quite bloated, eat­ing up more than a kilo­byte of RAM, but it still left space for some text, pic­tures and flashy effects which were used to illus­trate the story.

The demo uses a psy­cho­log­i­cal trick caus­ing the lis­tener hear details that are not there. There are only fif­teen dis­tinct sounds in the voice syn­the­sizer — far from enough — but since the view­ers also read the lyrics while lis­ten­ing, they get the illu­sion of hear­ing the words prop­erly.” –viznut/PWP

“Robotic Lib­er­a­tion, released at Assem­bly 2003, is still my finest show-off regard­ing what can be made with an unex­panded VIC-20 (and a stan­dard disk drive). The demo is designed around an apoc­a­lyp­tic con­cept sim­i­lar to that in Robotic War­rior and con­tains refined ver­sions of many of the ideas intro­duced in my ear­lier work.

Unlike its pre­quel, how­ever, Robotic Lib­er­a­tion is not an illus­trated story but rather like a music video invit­ing robots into a bat­tle against human­ity. You are free to inter­pret it as hav­ing an anti-fascist and/or techno-sceptical mes­sage. Also the graph­ics and effects are much more abun­dant than in the pre­quel.” –viznut/PWP

Not the most fresh 8bitpeoples, but just great!

Trash80’s sec­ond album Icarus from the last May is just disco and more disco (with clicks and bleeps included).

“Dive onto the dance floor with a hybrid heart of NES bleeps and heavy beats. Trash80 has made his way back from exile with his long over due sec­ond EP Icarus– A mod­ern chip-rock-techno-electro dance excur­sion. Push, climb, bite, crawl your way though the super galac­tic inter­stel­lar net­work of con­scious­ness to redis­cover one of next years hottest releases to date.” –Trash80.net

• Trash80.net

Source: arab-music.com

June Chiki Chikuma or Jun Chikuma has cre­ated orig­i­nal music for Bomber­man games since the first one came out in 1985. The one that holds spe­cial place in my heart is Japan-only release of Super Bomber­man 5 released in 1997 for SNES. It has many mem­o­rable melodies and cheer­ful tunes. All in all, fab­u­lous stuff.

Whole sound­track is avail­able e.g. at Zophar’s Domain in .spc for­mat. I’m using SNE­Samp input plug-in for Winamp. Any other player will do as well.

Kyny­Nasty Super Bomber­man 5 top picks (160kbit):
Zone 2
Zone 3
Zone 5A-Electro
Zone 5D-Magnets

SPC Play­ers & SNES music

There’s lot of new elec­tronic music terms/genres/themes over the past few years. Dub­step is quite self-evident and jus­ti­fied, Skweee is ulti­mately just dis­tin­guish­able style of elec­tro, Bal­ti­more is solely par­ty­mu­sic and “blog house” just futile term (imo New House would be bet­ter). This sum­mer we have yet another theme for music that have existed pretty long time.

Mar­tin Clark calls it “Wonky”, Sasha Frere-Jones “lazer bass”, Mega­soid calls the music “psy­che­delic robo crunk remix action” , Ghis­lain Poirier uses the phrase “bas­tard bass”, edIT offered the phrase “dig­i­tal crunk shit.” and the list goes on. This music has been going on since EL-P  and Def Jux (which strangely no one men­tions when talk­ing about this new gen­er­a­tion of futur­is­tic hip hop shit), Dabrye and Prefuse 73.

I’ve been refer­ring this music just “off-beat” hip hop or lately “Elec­tronic Beats” (which refers closely to Eliot Lipp’s blog of the same name). All I know that I’ve liked it all the time never mind the term. If it’s good. So this is loosely the theme for this months Kyny­Nasty party. Off-beats, Skweee, New House and yes, some Chip­tunes too. The Return of the Boom Bap? Perhaps.

More about “Wonky”:
Mar­tin Clark’s Pitch­fork arti­cle
“Lazer-guided” arti­cle at The New Yorker
“Wonk Fonk”, free mix for down­load
Hud­son Mohawke — Hudson’s Heeters, beat tape (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

Off-topic:
What is Wonky techno? Phew, you could spend hours and hours research­ing all the gen­res and styles.

I just dis­cov­ered a very inter­est­ing event from the last Jan­u­ary called C64.sk Cover Music Compo #1. While some of the tracks are pretty lame, most are worth lis­ten­ing and many of them are in fact, very interesting.

Here is the orig­i­nal web­site to down­load all the tracks of the com­pe­ti­tion in MP3, SID and PRG format.

I chose to waste some of my pre­cious time and picked my own top five listing:

1. Dane: The Great Destroyer

• MP3 link | orig­i­nal song: Nine Inch Nails: The Great Destroyer

So dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers. The most strik­ing are the rhythm-patterns. The sounds are great! Nuts!

2. Jam­mer: Galaxy Bounce (Tomb Raider Mix)

• MP3 link | orig­i­nal song: var­i­ous melodies from Tomb Raider or what?

Some weird stuff. I have no idea! Nice and repet­i­tive though… I think the orig­i­nal song is not much present nor rich in aspect? I like this one a lot also…

3. Mitch, MSK & Fanta: Every­body Every­body (Crest Avant­garde Mix)

• MP3 link | orig­i­nal song: Black Box: Every­body Everybody

Plainly sim­ple and very pleas­ant to lis­ten. Funky stuff…

4. The Blue Ninja: Queen of Rain

• MP3 link | orig­i­nal song: Rox­ette: Queen of Rain

Nice and slow. The cover has the same melan­cholic feel­ing as the original…

5. A-Man: Ely­sion

• MP3 link | orig­i­nal song: Zardax: Ely­sion (tune 2)

Very basic but still a great SID track…