Booze Design raises the bar for tech achievement on a C64 demo.
So, another X party has finished! This milestone of the C64 scene has delivered some of the best productions of the last years, as always. Let’s have some of the official blurb:
“13 years of X parties, 10 years at the farm, the 9th X in total and still going strong. Who would’ve thought.
The biannual c64-only event in rural Netherlands has been one of its kind in 8-bit partyland. Not only do you get brilliant demo/graphics/music competitions, but you also get a nice bed, hot showers, proper food, breakfast and all the beer, soft drinks, tea and coffee you can drink.
For the competitions and performances you can count on a high quality big screen and audio equipment to keep the cows awake.”
The stream of releases is BIG, as always the C64 scene proves to be one of the most productive in the demoscene, and the quality bar is usually quite high. This party has seen the release of the tech-groundbreaking demo “Edge of Disgrace” by Booze Design, which has raised the bar for C64 demo tech quality very, very high. I can’t wait for X’2010 when this demo should be surpassed by a new one :)
Other personal favourites are Pearls for Pigs from Xenon, and My Beauty from Fairlight (featuring music by mr. Goto80)
On the music side, I can recommend to give a listen to the tunes by Randall and Fanta.
Atarimatt sends TCTD a cd-r of his new split “I Was A Teenage Metalhead”. Atarimatt, working entirely on two copies of synthcart on the Atari2600 makes probably the best use of the TIA chip outside Slocum’s own Treewave. The first track on the disc, “Space Squid Shakedown” is its most succesful track, with slow building tension and adept use of the 2600’s especially limited sonic palette. Atarimatt does use some mixing and effects, but the use is subtle and does not detract from the song, rather reinforces it.
After a track from other band, electro Proggers GUL, atarimatt second track “The Electric Monsters”, is a jaunty well played tune, but perhaps falls victim to the shortcomings of the TIA with its limited pitch range. Everything about the track is solid, it just did not grab me as strongly as the lead-off track.
Finally the two artist take turns remixing the rad atarimatt tune, “Commuter”. The source song, on atarimatts myspace” , is itself a beautiful track, and the remixes are different enough to be unique pieces of work. The disc itself comes packaged with artwork and stickers for the bands and label. At five bucks its a very low risk high reward proposition, and a great showcase of the potential of synthcart at its best.
You can get it for $5 anywhere in the US at his myspace.
PopMatters wrote a review of Nullsleep‘s Lit Lounge Show on Oct 3rd. While its geat to see an lengthy article focusing on one of the live greats of the scene, the article falls short in a few ways. Some Excerpts:
But back to the familiar part for a moment: Imagine he’s set up like a conventional DJ, with pulsating basslines reaching outward from a huge 4×12 speaker cabinet atop of which he has placed a mixer cabled to two turntables. Now scratch the turntables—instead, they’re Game Boys.
Its a common conceit amongst many authors that chip music IS JUST like something you know very well, but MIND BLOWINGLY different. He goes on to overly complicate and mystify the process by describing artists using “expensive proprietary writers, others imported from Europe thanks to an industrious German” and making the logical leap that “it’s a lot like Tetris, but with square waves taking the place of those infernal L-shapes.”
But while he gets the basic demoracy of the chip platform wrong, he does touch on the point of it all with the following:
“There’s a minimalism in the equipment which you’d think would parallel the compositional philosophy, but in fact it seems to be the inverse. How much noise can we make with this? How complex can the songs get with just two toys? With eight bits? Some say the absence of limitations is a mortal enemy of creativity; Johnson takes that philosophy and bites its head off as though it’s a dead bat.”
So it still worth a read, as we still wait for the right author to speak evocatively about the scene from an outsiders perspective. I would like to see in the future authors start judging the music on the merits of the compostion isntead of waxing pihlosopically at length about the boring technical details, all the while getting many parts of the process incorrect, or simply representing them in a way that further distances the artists from potential fans.
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