Children of the night | The Rewind Vol. 13

Every year at the Video Vault, on the first Friday of October, a retired mailman named Walt rented the same tape. Dracula, the 1931 one, Bela Lugosi in the cape. We had two copies and he never once took the newer one. He'd slide it across the counter, pay the $2.49, and before I could hand him the receipt he'd lean in and do the line, in the voice: "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." Then he'd wink at whoever was behind him in line, usually some kid holding Ghoulies II, and leave.

I was sixteen the first year and I thought he was the strangest man in Parma. By the third year I was doing the line back at him. He brought the tape back on Saturday morning every time, rewound, which put him in the top one percent of human beings as far as I was concerned.

I've been thinking about Walt all week because a band in Berlin named a record after his line, and because October finally showed up in the release pile like it had been waiting outside. This is a dark issue. Two-thirds of the new records I liked are about vampires, curses or somebody's brutal hours. I'm fine with it. Walt would be thrilled.

Children of the night

Start with the big one. DROIDGLOW put out his second album for NewRetroWave on Friday, and it's called Brutal Hours. If you've been reading for the past month you've already met three of its tracks without knowing they were a record: "Legacy of Terror," "Danse Macabre" with Droid Bishop, and "Together We Will Survive" with New Arcades all came out as singles and they're all here, sitting in a row like they were planned that way from the start, which I assume they were.

The label's description is short and doesn't pretend to be anything else: "This one is more brutal than the last," it says, and it promises "gritty dynamics and commanding synths" and calls it "a must play for all Darksynth lovers." The tags run industrial, techno, synthpop and retrofuture, and the track titles tell you the rest: "Sins of Devotion," "Hellbound," "Sacred Transgressions," "Profane Covenant." This is Carpenter Brut and Perturbator territory, and in October that's exactly where I want to live.

What makes it more than a pile of singles is the guest list. Of the 11 songs, 9 carry a featured artist right there in the title. House of Serpents on "Hellbound," with Shaun Phillips singing (the credits note he's also in LeBrock). Rafael Jannotti on the title track and again on "Neon Nights," where he's backing Sarah Orloff. Dreamreaper on "Darknet." ALEX on "Find an Excuse," Dav Dralleon on "Sacred Transgressions," Connör closing it out on "Profane Covenant." And the credits do something I wish every collaboration record did: they tell you who mixed and mastered each track, one line per song. Mikael Sehlin did three. Adam Sullivan did the New Arcades one. DROIDGLOW did his own on four. It reads like a call sheet, and I mean that as a compliment.

The digital is $11. There's a red vinyl pressing called the HELLBOUND edition, 180 gram, limited to 100, at $24.99. The last line of the credits is the one I always scroll to now, and I'll come back to it at the Art Desk.

Then the record that named this issue. Dina Summer are a trio out of Berlin, the Greek-German dark-disco couple who record as Local Suicide plus a Bavarian producer named Kalipo, and on Friday they put out a mini album called Children Of The Night. The page says the title "pays homage to Bela Lugosi's iconic line in Dracula (1931)" and then quotes the line, and I'll admit I read it in Walt's voice.

"Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." Walt did it every October for nine years, and he never once needed the tape to start first.

Here's how they describe what comes out of the speakers: "80s italo disco, new wave, EBM and early 00s electroclash," adding up to "a dark retro-futuristic synth/wave pop sound" with "club-ready basslines" and "epic melodic hooks." On the title track, according to the page, "high synths fire out like warning shots over propulsive basslines." The tags say dark disco, EBM, coldwave, synthwave. So this is the dance floor end of the dark stuff, and it's a different animal from DROIDGLOW. DROIDGLOW wants to knock the building down. Dina Summer want you inside it until two in the morning.

Nine songs plus five extended versions, and one guest, Joshua Murphy, on "On The Road." There's one called "Komodo 3000" and one called "Bats In Paris," and I'd have bought it on those two titles alone. It's €15 digital. Both of the fancy vinyl pressings, the signed marbled one limited to 100 and the transparent one, are already sold out, and there's a black repress at €20. Artwork by Benedikt Demmer, mixed and mastered by Jakob Häglsperger.

Paris sent its own entry. Sydney Valette's I Fucking Love You came out on Artoffact Records last Friday, the 2nd, and I'm counting it because I didn't get to it in time last issue and I'm not leaving it on the floor. The label says he "fuses aggressive EBM pulses and raw synth-punk with the cinematic, haunting textures of coldwave and dark Italo-disco," with "a bit of Sydney's bedroom-pop roots" thrown in, and the tags put darksynth first. Ten tracks, sung in at least three languages if you go by the titles: "Warrior," a Russian one called "Как Свеча," a French one called "Relèves-toi," and a closer called "No Ibiza For Mr Valette," which is the best title of the month and possibly a threat.

$11 digital, $30 on vinyl, $13 on CD, and a $100 test pressing with 6 left. Vocals by Valette with Natalya Petrikowa and Anton Berezin. The label calls it "a runaway contender for album of the year," which is the kind of thing labels say, and I'm not going to argue with it in October.

Now the scary one, and I mean that literally. Acryl Madness, from Moscow, put out Kairo on the 2nd, and it's a concept album with a plot. The page lays it out like the back of a horror paperback: "The Curse of Kairo (from Japanese «pulse») was once a myth, an urban legend on the outskirts of Asia," and from there it's people addicted to pleasure, a figure who haunts them, and a protagonist who "fatally hits a girl" while driving through a downpour. Anybody who rented Japanese horror in the early 2000s will recognize the word. I'm not going to tell you what the record has to do with the movie, because the page doesn't, and I'd be guessing.

The sound, going by the tags: darksynth, dark synthwave, outrun, breakcore, and one I had to look up, "kaidan," the old Japanese word for ghost stories. Back in the summer I wrote about Acryl Madness doing "the broken drum wing of darksynth" on TETRAGATAVA, Vol. II, breakcore tempos instead of four on the floor, and the breakcore tag is still here, so expect the drums to misbehave. Ten tracks, with titles like "You Are Cursed," "Who Answers," "Death Screen" and, my favorite, "Yokai Bluese."

The digital is $6.66, which made me laugh out loud at my desk. The CD is $13.33, an edition of 13, with 8 left. And there's a transparent 12-inch at $59.99, an edition of 9. Nine. There are 5 left. Nine copies is a dinner party.

The rest of the pile

Fixions put out The Power and the Glory on the 2nd, and I owe this one a proper mention because I had it in my notes last week and couldn't nail down the details in time. Now I can. Seventeen tracks, out of Aix-en-Provence, tagged darksynth, cyberpunk, metal and progressive, which is a fair warning about the guitars. The page carries no description of the music at all, just a short statement about love and truth and a thank-you "for all the support since almost 15 years now." Fifteen years of darksynth. I respect the stamina. €9, digital only.

Vioflesh, a duo from Santiago, Chile, put out Dark Bellow on the 2nd. Vio sings, Flesh writes. The page promises "cold synths, emotional vocals, shadowy atmospheres, and dark romantic tension," "a record made for modern goth hearts," and the tags say coldwave and darkwave before they get around to synthwave. Ten tracks, €10. The page also says they're bringing their sound to the USA, but no dates, so I can't tell you where.

For those of you who've had enough of the dark by now, and I see you, here's the light switch.

Laura Bolt is the project of Juliette Pym in Toulouse, and Another Day is her debut, six tracks, out on Tuesday. The page calls it "a miniature synthetic gem that weaves a subtle link between the minimalist purity of the synths and the melodic warmth of the singing," and the only two tags are minimal and synthwave. Pym wrote it, sang it and played the synths and the drum machine herself. €8 digital, €10 for a cassette in what the page calls a "crystal printed box," which I need to see in person.

Pauliphoo, out of Orivesi, Finland, put out Dark Hearts on Wednesday: eight tracks, €8, tagged dreamwave, outrun and retrowave, and there's no description on the page, so the tags are all I've got. Two things in the credits I liked. Marko Metso plays the guitar solo on "Driven by Love." And the cover is credited as "hand-painted cover art by Eetu Keränen." Hand-painted. I'll take that sentence over most of the blurbs I read this week.

Hills and Valleys put out a single called "Emergent" on Girlfriend Records, the San Jose label, on Friday. The label's line is that it "captures the feeling of breaking through the surface into a brilliant neon dawn," and the tags lean chillsynth and cinematic. It's $2 digital, and you can buy it on a 3.5-inch floppy disk for $9, which is Girlfriend's whole thing, and it's rad, and I hope they never stop.

Test Shot Starfish put out Aperion on Friday, twelve tracks, $9. The tags are the only description of the sound I've got, and they say downtempo, space and, I'm not making this up, NASA and SpaceX. One of the tracks is called "Stars and Rollerskates." No description, so that's the review.

And Karl Casey dropped a single called "Sleepless" on Monday on White Bat Audio, name your price, tagged dark synthwave and darksynth. The page is the usual White Bat licensing FAQ and nothing about the song itself, so I'll just tell you it exists and that it's free if you want it to be.

One more, and it comes with a correction I already made once. A few weeks back I had to tell you that "Arcade High on November 3rd" was a radio episode and not a gig. Arcade High, the person, is a producer out of Pittsburgh, and his self-titled album is up for pre-order for this Friday, the 16th, at $10. The description is the most personal thing I read all week: "After a long couple years filled with challenges, two heartbreaks, and an ultimate decision on whether or not to continue making music, I'm back with my most personal album to date." The tags say 80s, chiptune, synthpop. There's already one song out, "Sincerely Secret," built, the page says, "around a single vocal sample" as "a romantic and fun send-off to warm weather." Mastered by Charles Michaud, who you might know as Sid 64. I'm glad the answer to that decision was yes.

The counter list

Five I'd hand across the counter this week, no receipt.

DROIDGLOW with House of Serpents, "Hellbound." The one they named the vinyl after, so I assume the band thinks it's the one too. I've had the guest list memorized since Friday and I still can't decide whether this or the title track is the heavier.

Dina Summer, "Bats In Paris." The page lumps it in with the disco-flavored synth pop half of the record. I'd have pressed play on this title in any genre. The page files it with the record's lighter, disco side, next to "Burning Heart," so it's the one I'd play for somebody who thinks dark disco sounds like homework.

Acryl Madness, "Yokai Bluese." Track nine, the deep cut. A yokai is a Japanese spirit, and the misspelling looks deliberate, so somebody in Moscow put a little joke in the middle of a curse. I respect a horror record that winks once.

Sydney Valette, "No Ibiza For Mr Valette." The closer. I don't know who banned him from Ibiza and I've decided not to find out.

Laura Bolt, "Black Midi." Track two of six, from the lightest record in the pile. After an hour of curses this is the one I put on to make supper, and I didn't skip it.

Out of the house

The Midnight, the band that got me through most of the 2010s, did something new this week, which is rarer than you'd think on a tour this far in. In Philadelphia on Wednesday, at the Fillmore, the encore opened with a song called "Avalanche," sung with Jessie Frye, who's on the bill this run, and setlist.fm marks it as a live debut. They kept it in the encore in New Haven on Thursday. Then on Saturday in Worcester it was gone again, and the encore was "Summer's Ending Soon," done acoustic into full band, and "Sunset." Somebody at that Worcester show got the acoustic one and somebody in Philly got the debut, and I'm jealous of both.

Bonnie McKee is still turning up, too. In Baltimore on Monday she came out for "Runaways," "Jason" and "Sunset," and "Runaways" hasn't shown up in any other set this week. The rest of the show has barely moved since Richmond: "Sanctuary" up front, the long medley in the middle, "Days of Thunder" to close the main set. The Portland, Maine setlist page is up with no songs in it, so if you were there, you know something setlist.fm doesn't.

Now the part where I settle something. Last issue I told you Columbus was two hours down I-71 and that the Civic and I were in talks. The talks are over. I bought the ticket Thursday night. Tomorrow, Monday the 12th, KEMBA Live!, and I'll be the one in the gray Honda in the back of the lot, the least synthwave car in America, parked next to whatever the people from Dayton drove. After that they've got Louisville on Tuesday, then Milwaukee and Royal Oak, and the tour ends in Monterrey on the 19th. I'll tell you how it went next week, including whether they played "Avalanche." If they didn't, I'll tell you that too.

Further out: Synthrave Live in Sheffield on November 14th now has its hours and its names on the venue's page. The day runs from 1 in the afternoon to 10:30 at night at the Corporation, 14 and over, and LeBrock, Wolfclub and New Arcades are among the names on it. That's LeBrock twice in one issue, if you count the singer on "Hellbound," and I do.

Who's listening

This week the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan announced that a man named Michael Smith got 18 months in prison for streaming fraud. Smith is 54, from North Carolina, and he pleaded guilty back in March. From 2017 to 2024 he made thousands of fake accounts on the streaming services, set software loose to have them play his AI-generated songs around the clock, and collected the royalties. One number from the case stuck with me. In April 2023, all of Taylor Swift's catalog got 9.3 million family plan streams on YouTube Music. In that same month, Smith's bots ran up 80.9 million streams of his songs. On top of the prison time he has to forfeit $8,091,843.64. Digital Music News says he's the first person in the country to get a federal sentence for music streaming fraud.

I want to be careful here, because I'm a guy who writes about synthesizers and not a court reporter. But the reason this matters to the records in this issue is simple. Streaming money is a pie, and it's cut by how many plays you get. Smith made fake listeners and took a slice of the pie that belonged to people with real ones. Every one of those plays came out of somebody's royalties, and some of that somebody is the kind of artist I write about, the one selling an edition of 13 CDs out of Moscow. I'd have guessed more than 18 months for $8 million, but nobody had gone to prison for this before at all, so I'll take it.

The day after, the U.S. Copyright Office opened a public inquiry into streaming fraud, generative AI and bot farms included. Anyone can file a comment. The first deadline is November 23rd and replies are due December 21st. If you make music and you've ever watched your numbers do something weird, this is the one time a government office is asking you about it on purpose.

Also this week, Italy's competition authority opened an investigation into Suno's terms of service. The authority's complaint is that the license users accept "imposes the waiver of moral rights." Here's the actual sentence from Suno's terms, as Digital Music News quoted it: "you irrevocably waive any and all so-called 'moral rights' or 'droit moral' that may exist in or in connection with the Content or your Voice Model." In Europe, moral rights include the right to be named as the author of your work. You've been reading me complain about missing credit lines for two months. Here's a company asking its users to sign away the right to one.

And Suno hired a man from Ticketmaster, Michael Chua, to run what it's calling Suno Live Experiences, which includes Songkick, the concert listing site Suno picked up last year in its settlement with Warner. Chua says he wants to "take a song from the first idea to the stage." I'd like to know whose stage. The court side was quieter: the fight over a subpoena to Lightspeed, one of Suno's investors, landed in Boston on Monday and has a judge now, and nothing new hit the second Sony and Universal case.

Pixels and polygons

MiSTer, the open-source FPGA box that rebuilds old computers and arcade boards in hardware, one "core" per machine, had another week like last week, which I'm starting to think is just what weeks are now. The headline for me is a Macintosh SE/30 core that landed on Friday. The SE/30 was the compact Mac that people who knew about computers actually wanted, the little beige box with the 9-inch screen and real power inside, and the core boots System 6.0.5, 6.0.8, 7.1 and 7.5.5, from floppy or hard disk, with the 68030, the math chip, sound, and 8 or 16 MB of memory. The README is honest about what's missing: no serial ports or LocalTalk, no CD audio, no external floppy, no expansion cards. It also lists the source material it was built from, including Apple's own hardware guide and schematic.

Ownership, the line I add so you know what you'd need before you spend anything: you need a MiSTer, and the three boot ROMs come in the release folder, so you don't have to hunt for them. What you supply yourself is a bootable floppy or hard disk image with a System on it.

The same week brought a NeXTstation Turbo Color core on Saturday, the color version of the black NeXT workstations, booting NeXTSTEP 3.3, with the DSP chip, sound input and the printer port listed as not done yet. (Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT, which is the only thing most people know about them, and now you do too.) Sun-2 and Sun-3 workstation cores showed up Tuesday, running SunOS. Ownership on those: a MiSTer with a 32 MB or bigger memory board, and your own OS images. Main, the menu software, got a new release on Saturday too, with lightgun support for something called the X-Gunner. On the arcade side there's a core for Atari's Tank from 1974, rebuilt from schematics because there's no processor in it, just logic chips, and one for Exidy's Victory from 1982. You bring your own MAME ROM sets for both.

My Amiga 500 drowned in a basement in 1998 and I've never owned a Mac. I've now read four README files for computers I never touched, and I enjoyed every one.

Daytona USA, the fan rebuild I wrote about last issue, already had a PlayStation Vita build, and this week it got fast. A new graphics renderer merged on Thursday, and measured on a real Vita it runs at 57.3 frames a second against the arcade's 57.52, with no overclocking. The write-up explains how: the Model 2 board had no depth buffer and drew polygons in priority order, so the port hands each polygon a depth from its place in that order, and the Vita's graphics chip draws them in the arcade's exact sequence. That's the kind of thing I'll never fully understand and love reading anyway.

Ownership: the project itself still ships no game data, and the official route is still building it on a PC from your own Daytona ROM set and putting it on a Vita that can run homebrew. The pull request does link a prebuilt Vita package hosted elsewhere, so read the README before you go looking. Android and iOS builds work too, according to the project.

Atari and Retro Games Ltd announced THE800XL on Thursday, a full-size remake of the Atari 800XL, the home computer that sold best for them in the 8-bit days. Mechanical keyboard, Atari BASIC built in, HDMI, 25 games in the box, and, according to the press release, a working cartridge slot. $219.99, and it ships April 23rd, 2027, which is far enough away that I'll forget I ordered it and get a nice surprise.

Ownership: it's an emulation box in an 800XL shell. Your old cartridges are optional, and Retro Games says you can also load software off a USB stick. I never had an Atari computer. My cousin Pete's neighbor did. That's a story for another week.

The Evercade Nexus reviews came out on Thursday, three weeks ahead of the October 30th launch. Time Extension called it "a commendable upgrade" and said bundling Banjo-Kazooie in the box is the real masterstroke; Retro Handhelds went with "This is the One." It's $199.99 with the Banjo-Kazooie double pack cartridge.

Ownership: it's a handheld with no TV output. It plays official Evercade cartridges plus the downloadable Games of the Month the reviews mention, and there's no loading your own ROMs.

Two homebrew ports caught my eye on itch.io, both free. A developer named haroldo-ok put out Tempest 2000 for the Game Boy Color on Saturday, Jeff Minter's Jaguar game squeezed into a 2 MB cartridge. The Game Boy can't draw vectors or rotate anything, so all 48 webs and 845 sprites are drawn ahead of time and streamed off the cartridge, and the voice samples are the Jaguar originals. Ownership: a Game Boy Color flash cart that handles MBC5 ROMs, or an emulator. Real Game Boy Color only, it won't run on the original gray brick.

And yosoynacho put out Hang-On Jr. for the Mega Drive, the cheaper cabinet version of Sega's 1985 Hang-On, ported from a disassembly and running at 60 frames a second, with a Mega Drive mode that steals the turbo and brakes from Super Hang-On. It even supports the Mega Mouse. The page is up front that "AI assistance was used to build a Z80 to 68k assembly translator," and I'll note it the same way I'd note anyone's tools. Ownership: a Mega Drive or Genesis with a flash cart, or an emulator. Name your price, and the download is one 264 kB file.

Polymega's price went up last Monday, as warned. Base unit $599. The company blamed component costs, including AI data centers competing for the same memory chips. If you didn't order before the 5th, I'm sorry, I did tell you.

The Art Desk

Back to the last line of the Brutal Hours credits: "BRUTAL HOURS coverart by Coki Greenway." That's the fourth NewRetroWave cover with his name on it since September, after "Legacy of Terror," "Danse Macabre" and "Together We Will Survive," and all three of those songs are now on this album under a new picture of his. Coki made the singles' covers and then made the cover that holds them. If I'd been paying better attention I'd have seen the album coming from the art alone.

Coki's was the first name I ever put at this desk, back in September, and I've followed the work since. It's the reason I read credits to the bottom now. My note still hasn't been answered, and at this point I think the covers are the answer.

The other credit I liked this week is smaller. Eetu Keränen did the "hand-painted cover art" for Pauliphoo's Dark Hearts. I went looking for a portfolio so I could give Keränen a proper spot at this desk, and I couldn't find one I could verify. So it's one paragraph for now, and the rule stays the rule: when I can point you at the work and the person, the full treatment follows. If anybody knows where Keränen keeps the paintings, point me there.

Rewind culture

Forty years ago this past Friday, on October 9th, 1986, Fox went on the air as a network. The first thing it ever broadcast was The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, at 11 at night. I was in second grade and in bed by nine. By the time I was old enough to care, Fox was Married... with Children and The Simpsons, and I don't think anyone at the time would've guessed a late-night talk show was how it started.

The next day, October 10th, 1986, Peggy Sue Got Married opened. Kathleen Turner, Nicolas Cage doing a voice I still can't explain, Coppola directing, a woman who faints at her high school reunion and wakes up in 1960. It's a movie about going back to your past and finding out you'd make the same choices, and I think about it more than I'd like.

Video Store Day is this Saturday, the 17th, the sixteenth one. Twelve exclusives from a handful of labels, with MVD as the partner, sold only at stores that take part, and the 80s ones are good: The House on Sorority Row on VHS, Joysticks on VHS, The Last American Virgin on Blu-ray, Unhinged on VHS from Severin, and Troma's The Toxic Avenger as a limited VHS. The site still doesn't print prices, which I've complained about before, so I'll just say bring cash and expect to spend it. Joysticks is the one about a businessman trying to shut down the local arcade. Somebody at MVD has a sense of humor about what day it is.

I'd love to tell you which store to go to in Cleveland. I can't, because the store I'd have sent you to closed in 2002 and I was the assistant manager when it did. If you've got a good one in northeast Ohio, tell me, and I'll go Saturday and buy something Walt would've rented.

On the disc side, 20th Century Studios is putting the first three Die Hard movies out on 4K on December 1st, and Altitude in the UK has BMX Bandits, the 1983 one with a teenage Nicole Kidman, on 4K on December 14th. No prices or regions yet on either, so I can't tell you whether the UK one plays here.

The Academy Museum's Carpenter series is down to its last two weeks. All four nights he was billed for are done, and I haven't found a single report of him turning up anywhere else, so I'll stop asking. If you went to one, the offer from last issue stands.

Static

The blue vinyl of Casablanca Nights 2 was down to 60 last issue. It's at 59 now. One person bought one in a week, and I'd like to shake their hand, because a slow week for a pressing of 500 is still somebody walking to the mailbox.

Bandcamp's counter on Sunday morning said fans "yesterday alone bought 87,410 records." That's an ordinary Saturday, about half the Saturday after Bandcamp Friday a week earlier. The next Bandcamp Friday is November 6th, and I'm already saving.

Girlfriend Records has A Very Synthwave Halloween, Vol. 5 up for pre-order for this Friday, the 16th. Fourteen tracks. That's five volumes of synthwave Halloween compilations, which is three more installments than my podcast ever managed. (It ran two episodes. Don't ask.)

If you own a RetroTINK 4K or a 6x, there's new firmware out, v1.94.0, from last Tuesday. Free, and the notes say a single profile can now cover more than one resolution.

That's the week. I'll be in Columbus tomorrow night. I looked it up, and the 1931 Dracula is 75 minutes long, which is about how long the drive takes if I-71 behaves. I'm going to put on the Dina Summer record on the way down and do the line once, out loud, alone in the car, in the voice. Walt would want me to. Then I'll go stand in a room full of people who drove there too.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty