Used with permission | The Rewind Vol. 10

My nieces were over on Saturday. Carol dropped them off for three hours while she did something involving a dentist, and the older one, who is fourteen and merciless, watched me tag a stack of new downloads and asked why I don't just make it myself. She's seen the ads. You type in a mood, you get a song, it has a little cover and everything. She wasn't being a brat about it. She genuinely wanted to know what the difference was, and I stood there in my own house holding a phone and could not get it into one sentence.

So I did what any reasonable uncle does and read a federal complaint about it instead of answering, which is why this is going up late tonight. Sorry. The answer I landed on is boring and I'm going to spend this issue on it anyway. The difference isn't in the sound, it's in whether anybody wrote down the names.

Records first, because that's where the names live.

This week in music

The record I played most came out of Cardiff on Friday and it's the least lonely thing I've heard all month. Aeronexus, Virtua Interface, on TimeSlave Recordings, the UK label that puts out most of the British end of this genre. Eleven tracks and nine of them have a guest on the cover: Video Kids, Jana Tyrrell, ZITH, CATHEDRALIS and Synthenia together, Astrophysics, Strawberry Station with Seabaud, Beckett, Chris Zerby. The page tags it EDM, synthwave, electronica, experimental, pop, retrowave and vaporwave, which is either honest or a man throwing everything at the wall, and after four listens I think it's honest. The credits are one tidy block: written and produced by Harry Rowlands, additional production and mixing and mastering by J. Sabourin, track four mixed and mastered by ZITH, artwork by Frank Sandres and Ikum Animation.

£4 for the digital. The vinyl is £21.99, pressed in the UK by Press On Vinyl, yellow and black splatter, eight weeks out. The cassette is £10.99 and limited to 50, and when I looked tonight it said 17 left, which means 33 of you moved faster than I did. There are two bundles at £44.99 that pair the tape with a printed cassette player, one of them a glitter edition, and both of those read zero available. For the tape on its own you need a deck you already own, because nothing in that £10.99 plays itself. A tape deck with the album art printed on it sold out before the tape did. Work that one out and write in, because I can't.

Now the one this whole issue is built on, and it came out of Akron, forty minutes down I-77 from me. Sferro put up The Remixes on Monday, eight remixes he's done over the years, six bucks. His own description is one line: "A compilation of remixes I've done through the years." No manifesto. The tags do the describing instead, and they're a strange little spread for one record: house, breakbeat, italo disco, vaporwave and synthwave, which is about right for a man who put Skatebård and "Tainted Love" on the same tracklist. Then you scroll to the credits and it's a roll call. Art by Neil Scrivin. Typography by Neskimo. And then, track by track, in order: used with permission by Skatebård, used with permission by Vogel, used with permission by Joypopp, used with permission by Tommy '86, then Sakunera, Le Matos, Awkoder 89 and Betamaxx. Eight tracks, eight names, eight permissions, printed on a six dollar Bandcamp page nobody was auditing.

He remixed "Tainted Love" in there too, which is a whole other conversation about who owns what, and I'm not opening it at this hour. The point is a guy in Akron with a Bandcamp page did the paperwork. Hold that thought for about three thousand words.

Nobody made him print those eight lines. There's no law that says a Bandcamp remix record has to name the people it borrowed from, and no customer was going to check.

Faint Waves put out Aqua Blue on Friday, his first LP in seven years, and he opens his own album description with the words "PR nonsense:" before launching into the PR nonsense. I laughed out loud at my desk. What follows is the usual stuff about a sound that sparkles and soars, but the joke is that he flagged it for you first, like a guy handing you a brochure and saying "this is a brochure." The tags run 80's, 90's, dreamwave, eurobeat, instrumental and smooth jazz, and the titles back that up: "Jet Stream Dream," "Paradise Connection," "Ocean City Suite," "A Mach One Love Affair." $4. Written, produced, mixed and mastered by Faint Waves, art by Thirdbook. One man, one record, and he still credited the artist.

Michael Angelaux came back on Friday with a double A-side on RetroSynth Records, a small Los Angeles label, Secret / Bad Connection, four bucks for two songs plus both instrumentals. "Secret" is new, produced and co-written by Nicolas Rixon. "Bad Connection" is a Yazoo cover, and not the obvious one. It's a deep cut off Upstairs at Eric's, reworked here by Matt Cattlow, and the page calls it faithful. Covering Yazoo is a nerve move, because Vince Clarke already got it right in 1982 and Alison Moyet's voice is not a thing you borrow casually. Angelaux says this is the first single off an album called Casanova. He's been away from the dance floor a year, by his own count.

Loud corner. MASKED dropped two tracks on Friday, "Road To Fame" and "You Know That's Me," a dollar, and the description is four words of actual use: "Raw darksynth powerhouse." Everything else on the page is links. The tag list tells you more than the blurb does, and one of the tags is literally Carpenter Brut, the French act that more or less invented the loud end of this music, which is the darksynth equivalent of putting "sounds like The Beatles" on your demo and daring somebody to check. He's flagging it as a taste of an album called Beauty Hurts, out in October, and he notes the single already wears the album's cover art. Written, performed and produced by Marce Romero. Cover art by MASKED, which is also Marce Romero. Self-credited is still credited.

KNIGHT$ put out "Light The Fuse" on Thursday out of London, £1.50, backed with a Daniel Knutz remix of "Supernatural Lover." The page gives you no description at all, so the tags have to carry it: nu disco, italo, nu italo, synthpop. Four tags, two of which are the same word wearing a hat, and between them they promise a four to the floor Italo record with the bass high in the mix, which is what a man who calls himself KNIGHT$ with a dollar sign has been promising since he started. Whether this one delivers is on you, because he didn't write a word about it.

Two more quick ones, both Friday. Cassetter and RetroNight87 made "Sunset Drive" and then made it twice, a golden hour version and a night version, two dollars for the pair, and the description commits to a bit: sun-drenched synths, a soaring guitar solo, and specifically "behind the wheel of a Nissan 370Z." Not a car. That car. I respect a writer who picks the trim level. And Ilya Santana went back to "Hammerhead" a decade after the original and redid it with Linda Axelsson on vocals, three euros, the page saying it "ditches its original skin to plunge headfirst into a darker, more aggressive, and visceral retrowave aesthetic." That's a lot of adjectives for a man who already had a good song, but going back to rough up your own decade-old track is at least an interesting way to spend a Friday.

The local one. Lin Mezmer's Lessons in Blue went up last Sunday out of Cleveland, two tracks, $7.77, and it's the first EP from something called Portasounds. The whole project is exactly what it sounds like: "music recorded entirely with Yamaha Portasound keyboards," maybe with a Yamaha Electone thrown in. One long ambient piece called "Too Far Shooting Star" and a shorter, funner one called "Two-Eyed Torrent," and the notes say he's got so many of these recorded that this EP is a sampler for a full length. Somebody on my side of town is making ambient records on the keyboard your aunt had on top of the piano. I'm in.

NewRetroWave put out "Danse Macabre" on Friday, DROIDGLOW and Droid Bishop together, and the description is two exclamation points long: "Pure POWER! DROIDGLOW and Droid Bishop come together to make greatness!" Fine. I'm not here for the blurb this time. I'm here for the last line of the credits, and we'll get to it downstairs, because it finally solved a problem I've had since issue one.

Stock check on the pile behind us. Michael Oakley's Prologue has moved one format: the limited Illusion vinyl is gone. Red and blue vinyl, both cassettes, both MiniDiscs and the CD digipak all still read in stock, so the MiniDisc gamble is still open, though you need a MiniDisc deck before you press buy, and I still say you sold yours around 2004. Stabbing Westward's cassette run of 150 is confirmed sold out on the page. The 180 gram vinyl at $29.99 and the CD at $15.99 both still read in stock, but the page has stopped showing me a number, so the running count I'd been keeping dies here rather than get guessed at. Same problem with Johan Agebjörn's Casablanca Nights 2: still in stock, still €24, still shipping October 30th, and the remaining count isn't on the page anymore. It said 67 a week ago. Today it says available. That's all I've got.

No new Scandroid, before anybody asks. I checked the label and the roster twice because I wanted there to be.

The counter list

Five things I went back to, and why.

Aeronexus, "Cold In Space." Track nine, with Chris Zerby. The one where the guest list stops feeling like a guest list and starts feeling like a band.

Sferro, "Winter Games." Last of the eight. I put this one on in the Civic at eleven at night with the windows up and it turned Brookpark Road into something it absolutely is not.

Lin Mezmer, "Too Far Shooting Star." The long one. Made on a Portasound, in this city, and it does not sound like a joke about a Portasound.

Michael Angelaux, "Bad Connection." Because somebody had the nerve, and because I want to know what you think. I've had the Yazoo record since I was old enough to buy records badly.

MASKED, "Road To Fame." Three minutes of somebody trying to scare you in a genre that mostly wants to drive you home. One beer at shows, and this is the one I'd want loud.

Out of the house

Two nights ago in Seattle and last night in Portland, the Pacific Northwest Cinema crew ran a touring bill called Synth in Transit: Velocity 128, Odditee, Future Flux 84, Daniel Quasar on the Portland date. Velocity 128 are the Betamax Video Club duo whose cassette ate half of my week seven days ago, and those were the two Pacific Northwest dates I pointed you at. They played them. And here is my honest report from the desk: I cannot find one photograph, one setlist, or one review of either night. Not on the socials I can see, not in the press, nowhere. Two clubs full of people had a great time and the internet recorded none of it, which is either a tragedy or the healthiest thing I've read all week.

The Midnight are out on the Time Machines run through October 19th. The one report I could find from this week is San Antonio at the Aztec Theatre on Tuesday, Bonnie McKee opening, and a writeup that says the set closed on "Days of Thunder," "Summer's Ending Soon" and "Sunset" and felt "less like a greatest-hits checklist and more like a carefully paced collection." That's one blog, not a setlist database, so take it as one person's night rather than the official record.

Sheffield, November 14th, at Corporation: Synthrave Live is still on and the bill is twelve deep. Nightstop, Waveshaper, LeBrock, Wolfclub, 80s Stallone, New Arcades, Skyracer, Ace Buchannan, DJ Max Speed, Neon Paradise, Calida J, and Aeronexus, whose record I just spent four paragraphs on. Twelve acts in one room in South Yorkshire, which for a genre that mostly exists as files is a serious pile of actual human beings.

Correction, and it's mine. Last issue I ran through the calendar and put "Arcade High on November 3rd" in a list of dates alongside a Jessie Frye show, which reads like I was telling you about a gig. It isn't a gig. It's an episode of The Synth Owl Show on Nightride, the internet radio station, with Arcade High as the guest. You can't drive to it. You can listen to it in your kitchen, which is cheaper, and I should have said so the first time.

Pixels and polygons

Big one first, and it's the one I've been waiting on since I started writing about this core. Last issue the Sega Model 1 project's own release notes shouted at me in capital letters that the thing made no noise whatsoever, in any game, and I told you I'd play Virtua Racing in silence anyway because I was there for the shapes.

On September 16th, alphanu1 shipped a build with sound. The release notes now read, and I'm quoting the file that ships inside the download rather than the one on the front page, because those two have disagreed before: "Sound works in all three, in attract and in play: the sound PCB's 68000, its YM3438 and both MultiPCM channels, confirmed on hardware." All three, because a second build turned up that same evening, seven hours behind the first, and Star Wars Arcade boots for the first time. The file is called Model1_20260917 and I nearly printed that as a second day, which it isn't. The commit log says both landed on the 16th. Virtua Racing, Virtua Formula, Star Wars Arcade. Three games, sound in the attract mode, on a DE10-Nano on somebody's desk.

The honesty in that file is still the best thing about the project. Three more games aren't shipped and two of them can't be: Virtua Fighter boots and makes noise and reads your stick, but the fighting arena comes out the wrong size, so it isn't playable. Wing War and Sega NetMerc use a different I/O board and that board hasn't been built. And Star Wars Arcade has a second sound board that also hasn't been built, which means its music, including the theme over the attract screen, is simply missing. The one game that just got added is the one that still can't play its own theme tune.

Here's the shopping list, and it's longer than it looks. You need a MiSTer, which is an FPGA board that rebuilds old arcade hardware in logic instead of emulating it in software, and it has to have the 128 MB memory module, because that's the only size the author has ever run this on. You need your own ROM zips, one per game. Then the part that catches people: the arcade board had a separate chip handling the controls, and its firmware is its own download. The notes put it flatly: "You need the I/O board's firmware as well as the game." It is not bundled with any game zip. And, in case anyone was hoping, "Nothing here contains ROM data."

Second follow-up, same beat. Last issue I wrote that the roadmap CAVE's producer promised in his apology letter hadn't been posted. It's posted. September 18th, "Producer's Letter: Our Update Roadmap," and it has months on it: October 2026 brings a training mode where you pick the stage, including the new AREA6. November brings AREA6 into Shooting Royale. Then "this winter," Black Label, arriving with AREA6, new music for AREA6, and an assist mode. There is still no mention of a TATE mode anywhere in it, the option that rotates the picture 90 degrees so a vertical arcade game fills a screen you've turned on its side, which remains the first thing a shmup player looks for and the one thing nobody at CAVE will say out loud.

The other thing that moved is the price. DoDonPachi was $24.99. It's $12.49 now, and the store data doesn't show that as a discount, it shows it as the price. Reviews sit at 170 total, 79 up against 91 down, still Mixed. That's two more reviews than a week ago and the split hasn't budged. So the roadmap arrived and the price got cut in half in the same week, and you can read that as a studio getting serious or a studio getting nervous. I've watched enough retail to know those look identical from outside. It's a Steam download, PC only, no cabinet and no board required, and I couldn't re-confirm its Steam Deck rating this week so I'm not repeating a badge I didn't see.

Star Fox Enhanced kept shipping. Version 0.0.6.7 landed Monday with what the notes call a native GPU migration plus stereo, VR and gameplay work, and somebody pushed a French translation revision this afternoon, while I was writing this. The terms on the tin haven't changed: an alpha, not an emulator, and it will not start until you feed it a supported retail ROM that you dumped yourself. The notes say it in five words, "No retail ROM is included," and then leave you to it. Your cartridge, your dump, their engine. It runs on a desktop, not on the SNES.

THEA1200 hasn't moved. Still €189.99, still shipping December 4th, and you need to bring your own power brick because "AC adapter not included" is still sitting right there on the page, which continues to be the funniest four words in retro hardware. I've been saying I couldn't pin down a US price and that was me not looking hard enough: it's $189.99, and it's been $189.99 since they announced the thing in October of last year, back when this was going to ship in June. The Neo Geo AES+ is still sitting on September 16th, 2027. Nothing changed there this week either, but it turned up in the roundups again and I'd rather tell you it's unchanged than leave you wondering. That one is a new console that takes your original AES cartridges, so the shelf you already own is the point of it.

From RetroRGB's roundup on Tuesday, three things worth your time: a new shmup for the Master System, an arcade monitor from Arcooda at 21.3 inches and 1600x1200 in a real 4:3, and a set of new 1080p profiles from Wobbling Pixels for the RetroTINK 6x. Also a wireless controller Kickstarter advertising "100ms lag," which I assume is a typo, because if it isn't, that's a controller you'd notice from across the room. Two of those three want something you already have: the Arcooda is a bare monitor for a cabinet you're already building, and the Wobbling Pixels profiles are free files you drop on the RetroTINK's SD card, no new box involved.

UrbX Warriors finished. The 16-bit edition, for real Amiga AGA machines and real Mega Drives, closed on Thursday at 885 backers and £57,030 against an £18,888 goal. That's 302 percent. When I checked last Sunday it was 716 backers and £46,901, so 169 people and £10,129 walked in during the final five days. I lost an Amiga 500 to four inches of basement water back in 1998, and every financial decision I've made about that machine since has been indefensible.

House note: GameCube turned 25 on Monday, if you're Japanese. September 14th, 2001 in Japan, November 18th in the States, May 2002 in Europe. I'm not doing an anniversary piece off a launch date most of my readers didn't live through, but the purple lunchbox deserves the mention.

The ingredients list

Here's what I was reading on Saturday instead of answering my niece.

On Friday, September 18th, Universal and Sony sued Suno in federal court in Boston. Again. They already sued Suno in June 2024 over 560 works, and that case is still running, with fact discovery closing on the 30th of this month. This is a second, separate suit, and it's about the new model, the v6 that launched on the 9th and turned up in this column while the ink was still wet.

The argument is the interesting part. Suno's people have said v6 was trained from scratch, without Universal's or Sony's catalogue. The labels' complaint says that's beside the point, because v6 was trained on user interactions with the older models and by distilling knowledge out of those older models, and the older models are the ones they say were built on unlicensed recordings. Then they put it in one sentence, and it's the sentence I can't get out of my head: "Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it."

60,202 recordings are named in this one. For context on the arithmetic, statutory damages for copyright infringement run up to $150,000 per work, which is how you get press coverage using the word billion.

There's a reason this is a separate case instead of a bigger one. On August 18th, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV told the labels they couldn't bolt 61,026 more recordings onto the 2024 case, because doing that would drag out the fair-use ruling everyone is actually waiting for. He said file separately. They filed separately. Thirty-one days later.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend I know how this lands. What I know is what the word "launders" is doing there. It's a word about paperwork. It says the argument was never about whether the machine sounds good. It's about whether there's an honest list of names somewhere upstream, or whether that list went through a wash on the way here.

Which brings me back to Akron. Sferro's remix record has eight tracks and eight lines saying used with permission by, each with a human on the end of it. Aeronexus named his mastering engineer and both of his cover artists for a record that costs four pounds. MASKED credited himself for art he drew himself, which he did not have to do. A dollar single on Bandcamp did the thing that a company valued in the billions is currently in federal court arguing it did not need to do.

That's the answer I owed my niece on Saturday and fumbled. The song might come out fine either way, and some weeks I probably can't hear the difference. But a credit list has somebody's kitchen table at the end of it. You can write to those people. I've done it, twice this summer, and both of them wrote back.

Meanwhile Spotify's AI disclosure badge, the one that was announced for mid-September and then slid to "this fall" on the support page, is still reading "this fall" on that same page tonight. Mid-September has now been over for four days. I've checked that page every Sunday for a month and I'm going to keep checking it, because at some point a company either ships a label or it doesn't.

The Art Desk

In the first issue of this magazine I said I wanted a regular spot for the people who paint the covers, and that I was looking for the first artist. That was July. It has taken me ten weeks and the answer was sitting in a credits block the whole time.

Scroll to the bottom of "Danse Macabre," the DROIDGLOW and Droid Bishop track NewRetroWave put out on Friday. Past the blurb, past the copyright line, there's one sentence: "Cover art by Coki Greenway." That's it. No hashtag, no plug, no portfolio link. The label typed the man's name and moved on, which is exactly the bare minimum I've spent two months arguing for, and it turns out the bare minimum is enough to find somebody with.

Greenway is real, he's findable, and he's been busy: the same name is on the cover of DROIDGLOW's "Legacy of Terror," also on NewRetroWave, from earlier this month. Two covers for the same label inside three weeks. He keeps a public portfolio under the banner The Art Of Coki Greenway, and the work sits where you'd expect a synthwave cover artist to sit, somewhere between cyberpunk, retro sci-fi and the darker end of retrowave.

I want to be straight with you about what I've got and haven't got. I have two verified credit lines on two real releases and a portfolio I can point at. I don't have an interview, I don't have his process, and I'm not going to invent a quote about brushes to fill out a column. What I have is a name that the label bothered to print, which is more than most of the records I covered in July managed. If Coki Greenway wants to tell me how he works, my inbox is open and this desk is now officially a desk.

Rewind culture

Thursday, finally. The ticket came off the fridge after six weeks and I drove out to see The Transformers: The Movie at 40, and the twelve-minute short that Hasbro and Fathom hung on the end of it.

The room was maybe a third full. Four guys my age sitting apart from each other like we'd all arrived at a funeral early, two dads with kids who had clearly been briefed, and one woman who cried at the Unicron reveal and I want to shake her hand. The feature is still the feature. The animation still moves like nothing since, the soundtrack is still absurd, and Prime still dies in the first act in front of children, which in 1986 was considered a reasonable thing to do to a generation.

Then Optimus Prime: Awakening. Wassung directing, Parrott on the script, The Third Floor on the animation, Krlic on the score, the same four names I printed a week ago. It opens on the death again, the Matrix passing to Ultra Magnus, and then it goes somewhere the cartoon never did: Prime, dead, meeting the closest thing this franchise has to a god, who spends the rest of the twelve minutes telling him to accept it and let go.

It looks extraordinary. There's a painted, almost stop-motion quality to it that I did not expect from a promotional short, and the scale is handled by people who understand that Optimus Prime is supposed to make you feel small. And Cullen is Cullen. He had eight months left when he recorded it and there's nothing thin in the performance. The dialogue asks more of him than the cartoon ever did and he takes it.

I also understand why people are fighting about it. The reviews I read afterwards landed everywhere from "a bittersweet but much needed send-off" to one outlet calling it a travesty and an insult to the character, with a third saying it's "not the worst case of apology media" but has "some of the strangest timing." They're all describing the same twelve minutes. Here's my end of it: the short is a story about a man being told to accept his own death, released three weeks after the man who voiced him died, by a company that had spent the summer branding the re-release as an apology tour. Nobody planned that. It's still what the room got.

I sat through the credits, and then through the lights coming up, and then drove home on 480 with nothing on the stereo, which is something I do about twice a year.

Elsewhere on the shelf: Severin listed Revenge of the Living Dead Girls, the 1987 French one, on Tuesday at $24, which is a sale off a $29.98 list and will presumably go back up. Read the spec block before you get excited, because I did it the other way around. It's a single Blu-ray, 1.66:1, Dolby Digital mono, region free, 82 minutes. No 4K, no Dolby Vision, nothing on the page claiming either. The extras are the reason to buy it: an interview with the effects crew around Benoit Lestang, an interview with director Jean-Claude Roy, and a piece called "Inside Studio Lestang." Mono and a making-of about a French effects shop for twenty-four bucks is a fair trade. A 4K remaster of a 1987 Eurohorror cheapie is not a thing that exists, and I'd rather tell you that than let a press release do it.

Static

Bandcamp Friday is October 2nd, which is the date that has been on the calendar since the start of the month, unchanged. I'm flagging it now so you can build the cart like a person over twelve days instead of doing it at midnight like a heist.

Vehlinggo still hasn't posted since August 17th. That's the scene's only real journalism outlet and it's been dark for a month now. I'm not speculating about why. I am writing it down, because if it goes, the amount of actual reporting about this music drops by an amount I don't enjoy thinking about.

Reddit has stopped talking to me. Every route I've got into r/outrun and r/synthwave came back blocked this week, so there's no what-is-the-scene-arguing-about item in this issue. The scene wasn't quiet. My window got painted over, and I'm working on a new one.

Stock counters are disappearing from Bandcamp pages. Three records I've been tracking week to week, the Agebjörn pre-order, the Stabbing Westward vinyl and the Rosetta Stone reissue, now say available instead of saying a number. If that's a site change rather than three coincidences, then the running counts I do in this column stop being possible, and I'd like to know which it is before I promise you any more of them.

That's the week. My niece is coming back next Saturday and I've had seven days to shorten the answer, which means I'll probably read her a lawsuit.

What I've got from this week is a pile of receipts. A remix record that names all eight people it borrowed from, a core whose author writes down which games it can't run and why, and a label that typed an artist's name into a credits box where nobody was ever going to look. None of that is nostalgia. It's just the boring part of the job, done by people nobody was checking on.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty