Thanks for playing | The Rewind Vol. 14

I did the line. I want that on the record before anything else. Monday afternoon, somewhere south of Mansfield on I-71, Dina Summer's new Lugosi-themed record on the stereo, nobody in the passenger seat, I did Walt's line, the Bela Lugosi one from the 1931 Dracula that a regular at the video store I worked at used to say to me every October, all three sentences of it, out loud, in the voice, and a guy in a pickup next to me looked over at exactly the wrong moment. Walt would've loved that part most.

Then I drove the rest of the way to Columbus, parked the Civic at the far end of the lot behind KEMBA Live!, and went in to find out whether The Midnight, the Los Angeles band I wore out three car stereos on, would play "Avalanche," a song they'd only just started doing live. I said I'd tell you either way. They didn't. I'll get to the whole night further down, because the night deserves its own section and because the records came first this week, the way they're supposed to.

Here's the short version of my week: I stood in a room for 85 minutes, didn't get the song I drove for, and came home happy anyway. Then on Friday a record I'd been waiting on since the pre-order went up finally came out, and it was about the same thing.

Thanks for playing

Arcade High put out the self-titled album on Friday. The pre-order said a producer out of Pittsburgh, $10, out the 16th. It came out on the 16th, it's still $10, and it's the one I've had on the most since.

I've already quoted you the line from the pre-order page about two heartbreaks and almost quitting, so I won't run it again. The finished page adds what the record is about: "core memories as a kid growing up," and "navigating adulthood," and the way nostalgia has "molded me into who I am now." It still doesn't describe the sound in words, so the tags do the job: chiptune, retrowave, synthpop, EDM, 80s. Picture the bright, video game end of synthwave, with an eight-bit streak running through it and a dance floor at the far end. That's my reading of the tags, and after four plays I'd say the chiptune one is earning its spot.

And the track list is a whole childhood in ten lines. "Read-Only Memories." "California Games," which, if you're my age, was the Epyx cartridge with the hacky sack and the half-pipe, and I spent most of a summer on the BMX event at my friend Danny's house. "Bare Knuckles," which I'm choosing to read as Streets of Rage (it was called Bare Knuckle in Japan). "Class of '93," which is the year I started at the Video Vault, so that one's mine now, sorry. "2612 AD," "Minutes to Midnight," and then the last track is called "Thanks for Playing," which is what the arcade machines used to say when your quarters ran out and the reason this section has the name it has.

The credits have grown since the pre-order. Ryan Boosel and Nelson Boosel mixed it, and the mastering is still Sid 64's. And under all that, plain as a receipt, a new line: "No AI was used in the creation of this album or its surrounding promotional material." I've spent two months on these pages asking people to say what tools they used. Here's somebody who said it without being asked, about every single thing including the posters. Digital only for now, $10, no physical edition listed.

Pittsburgh's about two hours from me, same as Columbus in the other direction, and if Arcade High ever plays a hometown show, I know the drive.

Now a record that's the opposite in every way except that I've played it four times. Back in the summer I told you about Erang, the French dungeon synth project that had been making records since 2012 and had never once played a show, and about the 2027 festival in Scarborough that finally booked it. On Friday Erang put out a new album called MEDIEVAL NOIR. Synthwave is the last of its tags, but it's there, and I'll take any excuse.

What does it sound like? The tags run dungeon synth, dark ambient, fantasy synth, "vampyric dungeon synth," and down at the end, synthwave. If you've never heard dungeon synth, it's slow synthesizer music built for candlelight and castles, the stuff you'd hear on a fantasy game's title screen in 1992 if the game were sad about something. The about text isn't a description, it's a statement, and it ends: "Reality is broken. / Our timeline is a mess." Then a line under the signature: "In Memory of David Lynch." The titles do the rest. "Vampyric Music for a New Dark Age." "A Night at the Five Seasons Bunker Hotel." "A Giant Skeleton Arises to Kill the Fake Emperor," which might be the longest title I've ever typed in this magazine and I'm proud of it.

Eleven tracks, $3 digital, which is less than a coffee. The physical side goes through a label called Out of Season, and the numbers are worth reading: a deluxe vinyl at $39.99, 100 made, 50 left; a brown vinyl at $29.99, 200 made, 166 left; a cassette in two colors at $12.99, 300 made, 222 left; a CD at $13.99, 200 made, 160 left. All of it pre-order. Mastered by Arthur Rizk, which, if you follow heavy music at all, is not a name you'd expect on a synth record.

It's an October record whether it meant to be or not. I put it on Thursday night with the lights off and the furnace kicking on for the first time this season, and the house made that ticking sound the ducts make, and I've decided that's part of the album now.

And the one I was already waiting on. Girlfriend Records put out A Very Synthwave Halloween, Vol. 5 on Friday, the fifth year of their October compilation. Fourteen tracks, $7.

The label opens with "The shadows lengthen, the neon flickers against the autumn mist, and the ritual returns," which is laying it on thick, and I love it. The sound, per the page: "heavy basslines, chilling synth leads, and cinematic dread," running from "pulsing outrun" through "bone-chilling darkwave" to "atmospheric chillsynth." It singles out Tommy '86's "Spectre" for "razor-sharp French-infused cinematic tension" and Alex Lightspeed's "The Corrupt" for "high-octane vintage energy," and it says the record is built for "late-night autumn drives." I can confirm it works for those. I tested it Friday night on the way to the grocery store, which isn't exactly a foggy highway, but the parking lot was dark and nobody was in it.

Fourteen names: Prophylaxis, Tommy '86, Edictum, Into Moon, Alex Lightspeed, Gridluster, Innervisions, Hills and Valleys, enøize, AetherWave Serenity, Sight Telma Club, 58m south, Miracle Blade and Hexagon Sean, who closes it with "Intelligent Lifeforms." Hills and Valleys put the single "Emergent" out on floppy through Girlfriend earlier this month, and the label is doing the floppy thing again here: a 3.5-inch two-pack for $13. You'll need a drive. I gave mine away in 2009 and I've regretted it twice now.

The rest of the pile

3FORCE put out Strange Peace on Tuesday, with FiXT handling the publishing. Aleksei and Dmitrii Goncharenko wrote it, mixed it and mastered it themselves. The page skips the description, which leaves the tags to talk: darksynth first, then retrowave and synthpop. The titles lean action movie: "Street Fighter," "Magnum," "Cruiser," "Betrayal," and one called "It Could Be Worse." Ten tracks. Cover by Alex Ricochet.

Miami Viceroy put out Dreaming In Neon on Saturday, name your price, and I'm including it on the track list alone. Ten songs: "1982," "Weekend At The Lake House," "Roller Rink Superstar," "Broadway Square Mall," "Orange Julius," "Red Wayfarers," "Ocean Pacific," "Sadie Hawkins," "First Heartbreak," "Freshman Year." There's no description and no credits, just retrowave and synthwave tags and that list, and that list is a yearbook. Orange Julius was in Parmatown Mall, by the escalator, and I had a girlfriend for six weeks in 1994 whose entire personality was that drink.

Starfounder, out of Russia, closed a series on Saturday. Vengeance V, and the whole about text is one sentence: "The final album of the "vengeance" series." Darksynth and darkwave on the tags, $3, ten tracks, and if you played Metal Gear Solid you'll clock the titles before I can explain them: "Shadow Moses," "Outer Heaven," "Kept You Waiting," "A Farewell To Arms." The page doesn't say it's a Metal Gear record. It doesn't have to. As for the sound, the tags are all you get: darksynth, darkwave, electro, 80s. Going by those and the first two tracks, this is the heavy, night-driving end of the genre, closer to Perturbator than to anything with a saxophone. Cover art by Hioya.

Maxx Cadaver put out Killer Cuts last Monday, five tracks, name your price, and the page states the intent in one line: "Written and recorded to be the soundtracks of the best time of year, October!" Horror synthwave, darksynth, witch house on the tags, and titles like "Buried In The Backyard" and "The Butcher." J. Lewis did all of it, artwork included. This is exactly the kind of record I'd have put on the store speakers in 1996 while the horror regulars browsed, and nobody would have asked me to turn it down.

Kid Neon, on the UK label My Pet Flamingo, has Digital Bouquet, out Friday. Eight tracks; the tags say disco house, future funk, vaporwave, which puts it on the sunny side of this week's pile. J. Sabourin made the music and the artwork. There's a small cassette and CD run at £10.99 if you want to hold it.

Computer Talk, which is Max Everett in Seattle, put out a four-track EP called Star Party on Saturday for $2. Hi-NRG, italo-disco, spacesynth. "Into the Oort Cloud" is my kind of title. And Cassetter and Cyberwalker, from Warsaw, put out a deluxe edition of After The Rush, the original ten tracks plus eight remixes. The page says it blends "retro aesthetics with a modern touch and the warmth of real instruments," and one of the originals features somebody billed as Lebedev Sax, so yes, I went straight to that one. $8.

The counter list

The five I'd slide across the counter this week, one per customer.

Out of the house

Columbus. Monday the 12th, KEMBA Live!, the Time Machines tour, and I got there early enough to sit in the car for twenty minutes with the engine off listening to the parking lot fill up. People from Dayton. People from Toledo. A guy two spaces over with a Michigan plate and a jacket with "Endless Summer" painted across the back by hand. That's three hours of driving for a Monday show, and he'd done it in shorts.

The setlist's up on setlist.fm, 19 songs, so I can check my memory against it. They opened on "Sanctuary" into "Love Is an Ocean," same as Milwaukee two nights later. "Gloria" came fourth, then "Lost Boy" and "Deep Blue," and a few songs later "Jason," and Jessie Frye came out for it, and that's the moment the room changed temperature. The long medley in the middle. "Vampires." "Days of Thunder." And then "Summer's Ending Soon" and "Sunset" to finish, and the lights came up a little before 10:30.

No "Avalanche." It's not on the list and I'm not going to pretend I misheard. setlist.fm counts it as played twice, ever, both of them on this run, Philadelphia and New Haven, the week before. I got "Jason" with Frye instead, which is a fair trade, and during "Sunset" I forgot I'd driven down there for anything specific at all.

What I'll remember is the sax. I've said before I'll defend that sax with my life, and on Monday I didn't have to, because a room full of people from three states were defending it for me, loudly, every time it came in. I had my one beer. I didn't borrow a cigarette. The drive home was two hours and change and I didn't put on any music for the first forty minutes because I didn't want to.

Ten years of these songs alone in a gray Honda, and Monday was the first time I heard "Sunset" with other people singing it back.

For the record, two nights later in Milwaukee they added "Explorers" and Frye came back out for "Sunset" in the encore, so Wednesday got a little more than Monday did. The run ends tomorrow, Monday the 19th, at Escenario GNP in Monterrey. If you were there, write in. I want to know if "Avalanche" made it to Mexico.

Further out, Synthrave Live is four weeks from yesterday, Saturday, November 14th, at the Corporation in Sheffield. Tickets start at £30. LeBrock, Wolfclub, New Arcades, Waveshaper and Nightstop are on it. If I had a passport that worked I'd be thinking about it.

Who's listening

Quick one this week, because most of the AI fight happened in filings, and filings are slow reading. The biggest piece: Universal and Sony went after DistroKid. If you've never put out a record, DistroKid is the service a huge number of independent artists pay to get their songs onto Spotify and Apple Music. This week the labels filed to force DistroKid to say how many AI-generated songs it sends out, Suno tracks especially, and how its AI detection works. Digital Music News got the filing on Friday, and two pieces of it stopped me.

The labels call the numbers "highly relevant information that only DistroKid possesses." And the filing says that between March and September this year, DistroKid sent nearly 12 million tracks to one streaming service, which the filing doesn't name, and that's more than every other distributor combined. Twelve million in seven months. That's a number I can't picture, so I tried: if every one of those was three minutes, you'd need about 68 years to hear them all, no sleeping.

I don't know how many of those 12 million came out of a machine. Nobody outside DistroKid does, which is the labels' whole point. But here's why I care, same reason as the Michael Smith fraud case: the streaming money gets cut into slices by plays, and every slice that goes to a flood of generated tracks is one that didn't go to Arcade High or Erang or the kid on the Girlfriend comp. The record I opened this issue with says "No AI was used" right there in the credits. I'm starting to think that line's going to be on a lot more records.

Elsewhere on the docket: Apple filed on Tuesday in San Francisco to quash a deposition subpoena from Suno, so now Apple's in it too, at least as far as who has to answer questions. And in Boston the record labels filed their opposition in the fight over a subpoena to Lightspeed, the venture firm that's invested in Suno. Nothing's been decided yet.

Pixels and polygons

MiSTer, if you're new here, is the open-source box that rebuilds old consoles, computers and arcade boards inside a reprogrammable chip called an FPGA, one "core" per machine. It's not emulation in the usual sense; the chip gets rewired to behave like the original hardware. And I owe you a correction by omission first: on September 30th a developer named alphanu1, the same person behind the Model 1 core and the Daytona USA fan rebuild I've been following, put out the first build of a Sega Model 2 core, and I missed it. Model 2 is the board that ran Daytona USA in the arcade. That's the machine at the bowling alley on Brookpark Road where I put more quarters than I'll ever admit.

This week it got there. On Tuesday the release notes said "races at full speed." On Wednesday came mip-mapping and a better picture for CRTs. And on Friday a build went up that runs Daytona USA, Desert Tank and Virtua Cop on a single core, which the README says is all three of the original Model 2 games. Its numbers: Daytona at 57 frames a second against the arcade's 57.5, "99% of frames on time." It also says the whole design fills 99% of the chip, so this is a core that fits with nothing to spare. The README calls it a beta and lists what's left, which I respect: "Confirmation from CRT, wheel and light-gun owners," and MiSTer's audio filter is switched off to save room.

What you'd need: a MiSTer with a 64 MB or larger memory board, and your own ROMs. The releases folder is blunt about it: "You supply the ROMs... Nothing in this folder contains ROM data." For Daytona you also need the I/O board ROM, and the README warns that without it "you get no controls at all," a machine that runs and ignores you. Virtua Cop takes USB light guns, through a mouse or analog stick.

Same week, same platform, a whole different kind of machine. A developer named danifunker has a Power Macintosh 7300 core running on MiSTer, and on Thursday and Friday put out the seventh test build and two more after it. This is a 1997 PowerPC Mac, the beige tower era, and the core boots Mac OS 7.6.1, 8.5, 8.6 and 9.1, gets on your network over Ethernet, and even runs Debian Linux if you give it enough memory. The CPU runs at 70 MHz by default, with a 100 MHz option the notes are honest about: "100 MHz is an overclock: the design does not close timing there," so if it acts up, drop back to 70.

Ownership, since this one's tricky: the Power Mac ROM comes in the release folder (boot0.rom, 4 MB, the 7300's), so you don't have to hunt it down; you just copy it into the core's games folder. You bring your own Mac OS disk image. The CD-ROM and Ethernet need a modified version of MiSTer's main program that ships alongside the core, and floppies are read-only. It's not in the official MiSTer collection yet; it lives in the developer's own repository.

I've never owned a Mac, as I've said, and I'm reading these release notes like they're a novel. Somebody wrote down that one build on the 10th played "every sound an octave high," and that it was out "for a few hours" before they pulled it. That's the attention I want from people who rebuild computers.

The Macintosh SE/30 core picked up a sibling on Monday: the same source now builds a Mac IIcx, with Apple's color video card at 640 by 480 and up to 256 colors. The boot ROMs are still in the release folder, and you still bring a disk image with a System on it.

And the NEC PC-FX got a brand new core, worked on all week and released to the public today. The PC-FX was NEC's 32-bit follow-up to the TurboGrafx, sold in Japan in 1994, and it's mostly famous for anime games and for not selling. Ownership is the opposite of the Macs: no BIOS in the box. The README says you need "PCFX Bios version 1.00... renamed boot.rom" in the games folder, and it flags one known issue up front, that "the DMA or King RAM writes may be slightly too fast."

Off the MiSTer and onto the shelf: Analogue announced on Friday that the Super Nt and the Mega Sg are coming back, as the Super Nt+ and Mega Sg+. These are the FPGA Super Nintendo and Genesis consoles that went out of stock years ago and have been going for scalper money since. $219.99 each, pre-orders open tomorrow, Monday the 19th, at 8 in the morning Pacific, shipping in December.

These play your real cartridges, region free per Analogue, over HDMI up to 1080p, with USB-C power now instead of micro USB, and Bluetooth plus 8BitDo's 2.4 GHz pads without a dongle. Original wired controllers still plug straight in. The Mega Sg+ plays Master System carts too, and for Sega CD games you need the real thing: Analogue's page says to "connect Mega Sg+ to your original Sega CD." RetroRGB's take is that it's basically the old console with a few updates and no 4K, and that's fair. I'd still rather pay $220 than $500 on eBay, and so would you.

Homebrew. A developer called filgood put out Dolphin Splash for the NES today, free, "written in 6502 assembly," and the page says it "runs on any NES emulator and on real hardware with a flash cart." That's the whole ownership line, from the source. And on the Amiga side, deroybe has Dark Horizon AGA up on itch.io, marked "in development," a neon anti-gravity racer for AGA Amigas, the chipset in the 1200.

My Amiga was a 500, so it wouldn't have run this even before the basement flooded in 1998. The download's a zip and it's early, so expect what "in development" means. And while we're on Amigas: MiSTer's Amiga core, Minimig, got a 68030 option merged into the main program this week, running at its full clock with no slower steps, plus a version without the memory management unit for software that chokes on it, and Fast RAM up to 384 MB. That's a chip a real A1200 owner needed an accelerator card and a second mortgage for.

The Daytona USA PC rebuild, the one that got a Vita renderer earlier this month, merged rebindable controls and volume settings on the Vita this week, plus widescreen and wheel sensitivity. Still no official release on GitHub, so the ownership line hasn't changed: your own Daytona ROMs, built yourself.

Rewind culture

Video Store Day was yesterday. Last issue I asked if anyone knew a good store in northeast Ohio and said I'd go Saturday. Nobody wrote in, so I went looking on the Video Store Day site myself, and there's a store on its map called Way Cool Video, on Madison Avenue in Lakewood, which is about twenty minutes from my house. The site lists it but doesn't mark it as one of the stores carrying the exclusives this year, and I didn't want to drive over and make some clerk tell me no, the way I had to tell people no about Blockbuster returns. So I'm going this week, on a normal day, to rent something. A video store I didn't know about, twenty minutes away, in 2026. I'm still a little stunned.

CBC in Toronto put up a short piece on Saturday about the day there; the line that opens it is "International Video Store Day was celebrated in Toronto on Saturday," and the founder, Daniel Hanna, is in it. The exclusives list also had Grindhouse Releasing's Cannibal Holocaust on VHS and a Full Moon tape of Parasite limited to 1,000. If you went somewhere and bought something, tell me where. I'm collecting stores now.

Two 40th birthdays. Ratboy opened on October 17th, 1986, yesterday's date. Sondra Locke directed it and starred in it, and it's about a half-rat boy who becomes a celebrity, and I rented it out maybe twice in nine years at the Vault, both times to the same guy. And next Saturday, October 24th, Trick or Treat turns 40. Marc Price from Family Ties as a metal kid, a dead rock star coming out of a record played backwards, Gene Simmons as a DJ and Ozzy Osbourne as a TV preacher. Dana and I had a beagle named Ozzy, and when she kept the dog in the divorce she kept the joke too, and I can't watch this one without thinking of both of them.

Trick or Treat was a Halloween staple at the store. We had one copy and it was out every October from the 20th to the 31st, and I'd put the horror regulars on a list for it like it was a new release. I'm going to watch it this week. It's still the best movie ever made about the danger of playing records backwards, mostly because it's the only one.

Halloween week at the Vault had a routine. Carol's kids weren't born yet, so I'd volunteer for the 31st every year, and the owner would let me put a strobe light in the front window and play a tape of horror movie themes on the store stereo, the same tape, every year, until somebody complained, which nobody ever did. The Halloween theme. The Fog. Suspiria. That tape is probably where I first noticed a synthesizer could scare people, years before Drive sent me down this hole. Maxx Cadaver would've fit on it fine.

Static

Johan Agebjörn's Casablanca Nights 2, blue vinyl, edition of 500: 59 left last issue. It's at 56 now, with two weeks to go before it comes out on the 30th. Three more people this week. I check it more often than I'd like to admit.

Bandcamp's counter today said fans "yesterday alone bought 86,909 records," and yesterday was Video Store Day, so that's a Saturday where a lot of us were buying tapes instead. It's about 500 under the Saturday before. Bandcamp Friday is November 6th, three weeks out.

Bandcamp Daily ran Boy Harsher's Big Ups on Tuesday, the column where an artist picks records they love, and it's full of Severed Heads and other cold, dark synth things. One line from it has stuck with me all week: "Put this on to become invisible." I tried it in line at the BMV on Thursday. It didn't work, but the wait went faster.

That's the week. I keep thinking about the guy in the shorts with the Michigan plate, and how he probably didn't get the song he drove for either, and how neither of us cared by the end. Arcade High wrote a whole album about what nostalgia did to him, and the last song on it says thanks. That's about where I am too. Thanks for playing. I'll put another quarter in next Sunday.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty