I remember when I was younger, putting my shitty Radio Shack (r.i.p.) microphones up to computer speakers and recording music from Commodore 64/128 games. There was something in those tunes that blew my prepubescent mind.. to the point where I'd load the games just to hear the music. That crunchy, 8-bit sound... that others of my generation first heard in Atari and some earlier Nintendo games, has been seeing a bit of a renaissance lately, specifically in a slew of retro games coming out for smart phones (check out The Incident).It's a sound that may escape most generations pre- or post-ceding my own. I imagine the home video-gaming console craze didn't exactly sweep the attention of those born in the 1960s... and as technology progressed with those systems, so did the music quality... and the 8-bit crunch was lost to, eventually, actual orchestral scores... so kids born in the 1990s might not have the same connection to it either.
Ren Queenston, the Canadian composer/songwriter behind this and buttloads of other releases, I would guess is, of or around, my generation. The music here could easily be outtakes from a strange Atari game that never saw the light of day. As robotic voices sing to you about piñatas and about how they want to drink your juice, visions of pixelated venus fly traps and knife wielding Speak and Spell machines may spring to mind. Yes, it's a little menacing. But the marriage between glitchy '80s video game music and creepiness speaks volumes to my mind which, these days, seems to be impulsively grasping at those melancholic days of youth (where I played a lot of video games and watched a lot of horror movies).
I suppose that happens when one is in the midst of a midlife crisis. Life expectancy is only early 70s people! At 35, I'm feeling it. Time to buy a DeLorian, or whatever car it popular with the balding class these days.
RQ laji-2 - Bad Future Bullshit
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