Is C64 the new C86?

Mmm, wasn't C64 music the biggest influence on bleep 'n bass and early Warp? You may have a point though, what with Ladytron having a song named 'Commodore Rock'. My C64 has been broke for over 12 years sadly, although those C64 emulators are God's gift to humanity.

Funny you should ask this, since there's hopefully coverage of the micro-music scene upcoming in FT, when I can sort out a coherent and face-saving narrative from Friday night's events at least. That was - in brief - the Micro-Stars 2000 festival (micromusic.net has some details) - and the reason *I* liked it was because it gave me a fine opportunity to dance my arse off to melodic, propulsive music. There wasn't much overt nostalgic button-pushing - this was music inspired by 8-bit sounds, not a retrogamer disco - but there was a sense of amateurish fun.

What's interesting to me is that this is, if you will, hackerpop - I got the impression that a lot of the people doing it are coming out of coding backgrounds just as a lot of techno and house musicians in this country were ex-punks. It's also - unlike most of the look-back trends - a global (or at least first world) retro movement, in that almost every first world country had Amigas and STs.

I like Momus' comment on how it might be 'deeply reassuring,' because that brings up the whole issue of how warm and cozy such theoretically 'cold' music is. What to me would be terribly interesting is to see if somebody -- *anybody* -- wrote or talked about late seventies/early eighties computer game music at all at the time. Was it ever discussed anywhere? What did people think of it? Or did they just limit themselves to Kraftwerk comparisons and saying, "Did you notice they used a Speak and Spell on _Dazzle Ships_? On that one song?" Then again, that was for lyrics and not music...

As I recall there would usually be a mark out of ten for 'sound' in computer games reviews. Nobody really talked about it as 'music' though value judgements were being made like 'atmospheric' or 'annoying' - then later in the late 80s there would be points given for how like other music the soundtrack had got, i.e. the Bitmap Brothers I seem to remember being particularly admired for having credible soundtracks. They were also the first people to license 'proper' music for their games - Bomb The Bass did a track for them. It was also around this time though that sequencing and writing music on computer became popular and I think that early MIDI stuff - I dont know the technicalities, sorry - is all mixed in with the C64 stuff as an influence on this scenelet.

so which Zzap!64 scribes do we rate then...

I'm always fascinated by the fact that we never know where Posterity will come a-knocking.

Picture a quiet street in the north of England, sometime in the mid- 80s. Posterity, who looks a lot like The Reaper but carries a butterfly net instead of a scythe, knocks on the door of a detached house.

Paddy McAloon opens it. 'I am Posterity, and I've come for the pop of the 80s!' says Posterity in a grand voice.

'Ah, I've been expecting you,' says Paddy, and drops into the net a couple of pristine vinyl copies of Prefab Sprout's 'Swoon' and 'Steve McQueen'.

Posterity flings them aside angrily and marches into the lounge, where Paddy's 8 year old nephew is playing Arkanoid, filling the room with flurries of scuzzy blippy sound. Posterity grabs an armful of datasettes.

'Oi!' chorus Paddy and his nephew, 'that's not the pop of the 80s!'

'It is now,' cackles Posterity. Snubbing Paddy's 1000cc Triumph, he makes his escape on a poorly-pixelated BMX bike.

If you play a C64 in a normal tape player it sounds ace, I use them in my unavailable recordings! CD Roms don't sound as nice in a normal CD player! I wish I'd not got rid of my C64. Best song about C64's is "C-64" by Barcelona. What is C86?

its a bit like a vic20 only flashier.

Here's a story from the Record And Tape Exchange.

Two staffers, worked in the main shop. Didn't get on that well. Both had the same name as I recall, so let us call them X and Y. X liked Nick Drake, the Clash, the Byrds. Y liked Whitehouse, Costes, Throbbing Gristle, Incapacitants. An uneasy truce reigned until the new Weller album came along and X rather liked it. And kept playing it. Gradually Y upped the ante with his nasty noise records and X retailiated with softer and softer rock.

Finally Y put on something so completely shrill and hideous that X stormed to the tape machine and discovered, to his horror, that Y had been bringing in his old C64 games and playing them on the shop stereo. This was the last straw and he demanded a transfer forthwith.

Reactions of the customers were not, sadly, reported.

While I'm not sure about the C64, I know that mixing classic video game sounds seems to be an emerging trend, regardless of the source. In the last few days, I got the following links:
http://trooper.velocet.net/~checker/nin-mario.mp3
http://evolution-control.com/mp3/Cocoa%20Brovaz%20-%20Super% 20Brooklyn%20(featuring%20Mr%20Cheeks)%20(Mario%20Brothers%20Rap).mp3
Someone I work with also took the time to download a good portion of Buckner and Garcia's Pac-Man Fever album. All I know is that it all makes me smile.

I was a Vic-20 owner and was really aggrieved when my mate Ben produced some blippy song on a Spectrum after reading a feature about Pete Shelley's 'Homo-Sapian' in 'Electronic Soundmaker' in '83(?). Then the C64 came out and I had bought an Acorn Electron (darn) instead. I recently listened to an Alec Empire gameboy album and I gotta say Ben's stuff was better ( cloudy nostalgia alert ).I hear the C4 emulator - the sidstation - is mega expensive ?

The nearest Ben has ever come to the music industry was doing the pointing on Chris Rea's house.

I actually use sounds from the synth/sound-chip known as 'Sid' from the C64 in my music. If you're interested have a look at 'www.hardsid.com'. You can also buy a standalone box from another company called the 'Sidstation', I believe this is what Kernkraft 400 used.

Indeed my young years were spent listening to synth-pop and C64 game music.

Momus - you're right about posterity being intriguing - I would like to think that the most influential rap album of the last few years was the WWF one and that there will be a Kappa revival in twenty years time - but I know I'll be surprised.

I sold my stylophone to a technobod for £40 three years ago - he samples his washing machine.

I noticed that this week Pelicanneck list this as a new release

8 BIT CONSTRUCTION SET : Atari Vs Commodore - Beige - LP £9.99

Yet another slant on the recent 8-bit revival...this time round what we get is a battle record in which the Commodore 64's mighty Cid chip takes on Atari arcade machines and the legendary 2600. This is one of the most addictive, irresistable DJ tools we have ever come accross, complete with game sound effect samples, clips from adverts, and a series of genious, excellently cut locked grooves. The locked grooves are the real winners here - from electroid crunch to the computerised atari vocal of "Techno....House....." and the Cid chip's immaculately flat synth routines. To end things off in true style, the final track on the Commodore side is a data track that needs to be recorded onto tape and loaded onto the C64 for hours of fun. Well, just when we thought the 8-bit revival scene had reached it's zenith, along comes this mouthwatering slice of retro genious. Awesome.

If that remotely interests anyone.

In 1985 i enjoyed that Trans X - Living on Video, that sampled arcade game sounds.

I love Nick's fantasy on McAloon and posterity. I wanted reassurance that I wasn't the only person who makes up stories about real people in music at any given time in the past and their encounters with their enemies / curators ...

Geordie, there are C64 emulators that can be downloaded for free, you'll be amazed what games stood the test of time and which "classics" bore you senseless within a minute...bit like pop- history that.

Also the Kappa revival is happening right now, witness AS Roma's utterly brilliant no-bullshit kit. :)

Bah! C64s were rubbish. Spectrums (especially the +2, but not, of course, the +2A) were fantastic. I still find myself with old game tunes (usually from Target:Renegade or Batman The Movie) stuck in my head. Their source of strength is quite obvious really - due to memory restrictions the same phrase is looped for as long as you play, thus being drummed into your memory.

I'm still laughing over the Paddy McAloon story. I would, I'm so evil.

Actually makes me wonder what the hell Elvis Costello is thinking these days, for some bizarre reason. "Hello! _Imperial Bedroom_ was perfect pop! Why doesn't somebody listen to me! Cait, go throw another bundle of _Almost Blue_ reissues on the fire."

Thanx for recommending the downloads + websites.

Has Momus been watching Josie?

Ned R said (I think): 'did people in the 80s find computer music warm and cosy?' Strangely enough, I think the answer is a kind of 'yes'. For one thing, computer folks spent ages and ages playing the games, so the music became familiar and homely. Or is that a bad argument, cos the music would in fact just become annoying? I don't know, but I do remember enjoying the theme tune of Commando on the C64. And I've never owned a C64.

I agree with Ned R that EC's early-80s ventures didn't prove very influential (if that's what Ned R was saying), but I don't think that EC has anything to prove: especially not after Painted From Memory. But that's another debate for us not to have another time.

this is a late response, so i don't know if anyone will read it. but since a record i helped produce (the 8-bit construction set) is referenced above, i thought i'd add a little something.

and that something is just to say that even if 80's game music is now deeply reassuring, it's only for reasons of nostalgia, and to me nostalgia is intellectually and musically unchallenging. so many of these records that are out now are only interested in the surface aesthetics of the time, and hence serve either documentary purposes or blatant attempts to make some cash.

the 8-bit construction set record is instead interested in the process of creating music on a c64, that is to say assembly langage programming and low level control of the machine. it gets its inspiration not from the actual music, but from the spirit of investigation and learning about computers that was the foundation of the early home computer scene. now, the computing process is hidden behind flash plugins and bloated corporate interfaces...and as a result artists fail to understand the aesthetics of the very medium within which they work. they have no idea how to release 1's and 0's from the restraints of adobe photoshop filters or pro tools reverbs and simply neglect the craft of computation. i think it calls into question the authenticity and intentionality of computer art - in that "made with Macromedia" also gives Macromedia credit on a conceptual level to anything made with their software.

so to keep this from getting too off track, the nostalgia generated by our record is just a funny side-effect, not at all a reason in and of itself for us to make music. and the nostalgia i have is only for a return to craft and ritual in the making of computer music, something which on this record we tried to achieve by appropriating an historical technology and process which has been disregarded by contemporary computer culture. it's just about being true to yourself and your machines.

From Boomkat.com newsletter this week

ENDORPHINS
Discipline
Eat This
MLP // £ 7.49

The latest gem from the long dormant Endorphins crew gives up the beats in yo C64 stylee! The 12" comes with a free floppy disk formatted just for Commodore 64's, and 7 tracks on the vinyl......

Treewave are a cool American Electronica outfit (currently supporting The Polyphoinic Spree) who do all their instrumentation with C64s, Atari VCS and old daisy wheel printers. Somehow they put me in mind of BIS. They rock.

Zzap: Julian Rignall was a twat wasn't he.

Going back to Ned's point about Speak and Spells - I didn't realised until my wife dug out her old Speak and Spell machine that the beeping noises heard at the very start of "Home computer" are factory preset sounds on a Speak and Spell. She'd passed the machine on to one of our nephews who was playing with it and I said "Bloody hell, that's the start of 'Home computer' and you don't even realise it". Of course, the rest of the family looked totally bemused and thought "Just Rob being weird again" and carried on.

Revive! During my analog synth obsession, I came across this C64 remix scene on a zillion websites — at the time I thought it was new music being created on C64's. Only recently did I realize why it sounded (aurally) so incredible: it was C64 melodies being created on new gear.

To challenge Rick Stryker's point, am I the only one who finds it WEIRD AS HELL that there's this big scene taking these videogame songs that only a this super tiny group of people ever even heard and spending all this time recording new versions of them? And in some cases on classic equipment!

www.remix64.com
www.c64audio.com
c64takeaway.com

Come on, ILM -- CARE!