The best record of the week was free | The Rewind Vol. 4

Sunday. The actual one, filed on the correct day of the week, and I'd like a small round of applause followed by everybody immediately forgetting I said anything. Last time I bragged about hitting the deadline I missed the next one by two days and had to open an issue apologizing for it. I'm superstitious now. Let's move on.

It rained Thursday night, the sideways kind that comes off the lake and makes the whole street smell like hot asphalt going cold. Friday morning the attic was 71 degrees at eight o'clock. I opened the window, sat there with a coffee and did nothing for twenty minutes, and in an Ohio attic in August that qualifies as a vacation. The second fan stayed off until about two in the afternoon, when the roof remembered what month it was.

Then it was Bandcamp Friday and I did what I said I'd do, which was keep the receipt.

The damage report

Two issues back I told you I'd give you a real number after August 7. Here it is: eleven items, sixty three dollars and change, and one of them was free and I still feel like it cost me something.

Before the confession, the scale of the day. Bandcamp waives its cut on Bandcamp Fridays, so artists keep effectively everything minus payment processing, and the scene knows it. Roughly a hundred and twenty five records went up under the synthwave tag across the week. Fifty eight of them landed on Friday alone. That's not a coincidence, that's a whole genre holding its breath from Tuesday and exhaling at midnight.

Now, the receipt.

The one I'd have paid triple for is the Jorja Chalmers and Johnny Jewel EP, Crying Game, out Friday. Three tracks, all the same song: the vocal, an instrumental, and a drumless vocal mix. Chalmers is the Australian saxophonist who has spent years in Bryan Ferry's band, and whose Roxy Music work Ferry called out by name from the stage at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. Jewel is the Chromatics and Desire architect whose fingerprints are on half the music you associate with driving at night through a city you can't afford. Her voice through his mix is exactly what you'd hope. Three pounds. The page also says this is the first taste of her third album, which is the actual news buried under a three track EP.

Here's the part that annoyed me. Bandcamp's own editorial column, Essential Releases, ran that same Friday and had no synthwave in it at all. Not one. The closest thing was a trance and jungle record built from video game soundfonts, and it's good, but come on. The genre spends the whole month pointing every fan it has at your checkout page on your promotional day and your writers look straight past it. I'm not owed coverage. I'd just like somebody over there to open the tag once.

One week after

Kavinsky's funeral is Wednesday.

His family published the notice in Le Figaro. The service is at 10:30 on the morning of August 12 at Saint Pierre de Montmartre, one of the oldest churches in Paris, twelfth century, up on the hill in the eighteenth. The burial follows at Saint Vincent cemetery, a few hundred meters away. The notice doesn't say whether the service is open, and I'm not going to speculate about that or about anything else, for the same reason I gave two weeks ago.

That's the whole item. I keep starting a second paragraph and deleting it. A church built in the eleven hundreds and a man who made a record about a car, and both of those things are true on Wednesday morning at the same address.

This week in music

The rest of the receipt, roughly in the order I played it.

Isidor put out a single called "Turbo Fighter" on NRW Records Friday and the label posted it to the main channel the same day, which they don't do for everything. It's the arcade boss end of retrowave, the muscular one, not the sad drive home one. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Isidor Bobinec himself. The label's note says an album is on the way, and that's the part I circled. Isidor working on a full record is a better piece of news than most of what got announced this week.

Neon Retro Records put out three records on Friday. Three. In one day, on the day everybody is fighting for the same wallets, one label decided the answer was volume.

The best of the three is METTASTATION's self titled, twelve tracks and easily the most ambitious thing I heard all week. It's a hard science fiction concept album with an actual cast, characters named Lorett and Kyle and Emily, who get out of the fall of a place called Pacific City and immediately end up inside an ancient machine running a body processing conveyor. There are live guitar solos on two tracks from Mike Isakov and Anastasiya Habarova voices Lorett. Six dollars digital, twelve for the CD. It's tagged spacewave and new age as much as synthwave, and if that combination sounds like a warning, it isn't. It's wide and slow and it commits to the bit for an hour.

The same label also has Morze1982's Run Dream, seven instrumental tracks of pure spacewave out of Belarus, and a re issue of Sellorekt/LA Dreams' Visions. Read that last one carefully, because I nearly got it wrong: the credits say the original release date was May 1. This is the label picking it up, not a new EP. I'm telling you because I saw two feeds list it as new and I was about to be the third.

Sellorekt is worth a sentence anyway. NewRetroWave was uploading that guy thirteen years ago. There's a version of this scene's history where the founding workhorses get a plaque, and instead they get a Friday reissue at three dollars.

Jessy Mach's "Chrome and Champagne" has the best liner note of the week and I'm going to quote the shape of it rather than the whole thing. A glass of champagne left on a car bumper, catching orange sunset off the chrome, and then the bar empties out toward a club on the water and that same light starts breaking apart, turning colder and sharper until it's just flashes off a mirror ball. Everything on it is Frédéric Faupin, in Nice, all the guitars and keys and drum programming. It's the nu disco end of outrun and it's three tracks for the price of a coffee. The video is cut from Scarface and Cocktail footage, and his own credits date Scarface to 1984. It's 1983. I only mention it because I've been that guy and somebody should tell you kindly.

Acryl Madness dropped TETRAGATAVA, Vol. II, six tracks of the broken drum wing of darksynth, breakcore tempos rather than four on the floor, framed as a pirate radio transmission about a lab prototype that got loose. The digital is four dollars and forty four cents. The limited ten inch is fifty six dollars and sixty six cents. I want to be clear that I noticed, that they knew I'd notice, and that I respect it.

And then there's WLDV in Bilbao, who wins the week on principle. He unburied a pile of half finished new beat tracks, finished them off, and gave them away free. His words: just in time for Bandcamp Friday. The one day of the year he'd have kept the entire sale price, he chose to charge nothing. Two tracks, "The End Of Man" and "I Like This World," and the page quotes Blair from The Thing in blackletter. It's Belgian new beat and acid, not retrowave at all, and it's the record I've replayed most since Friday.

I paid for it anyway. Bandcamp lets you overpay on a name your price and I typed in five dollars like an idiot with feelings.

One more and then I'll stop reading you my bank statement. REPLYKANT in La Paz put out an EP called Horizon that is one song four times: original, slowed and reverb, ultra slowed and reverb, sped up. That's the TikTok release format arriving in darksynth as a native thing, not as a fan edit somebody else made. Three dollars. I don't like it. I also think it's going to be completely normal inside two years and I'd rather be on record now.

Last note from the sales charts, and it's a funny one. The best selling record in Bandcamp's synthwave tag this week was Saint Pepsi, and it's vaporwave, and it's a reissue of three albums he made on three consecutive days around Christmas 2012. Sixty two pounds for the triple vinyl box. So the tag's number one seller on the genre's biggest sales day was fourteen year old vaporwave, remastered for vinyl and sold in a box, which either says something about where the money in this corner of the internet actually goes or says nothing at all and I've been staring at a sales chart too long.

Out of the house

Carpenter Brut and HEALTH announced a European run this week, Conflict: Europe 2026, with VOWWS opening. It continues the co headline thing they did across North America in the spring. Read the poster and not the headline, though, because the poster is doing more work. Carpenter Brut is only on ten of the dates: Utrecht on November 3, then Bristol, Glasgow and Wolverhampton, then Hamburg and Leipzig, then Kraków, Wrocław, Budapest and Milan. Everything else on that sheet is HEALTH, alone at Damnation Festival on the 7th, with VOWWS in London on the 9th and Prague on the 15th, then a seven date November stretch with VOWWS and Doodseskader through Solothurn, Munich, Mannheim, Hannover, Berlin, Cologne and Paris.

So if you're in Europe and you want the French half, check which night you're buying. I've watched people drive four hours to a co headline tour and get the other guy.

The pairing works, for what it's worth. Carpenter Brut arrives at heaviness through synthesizers and metal dynamics and cinema; HEALTH gets there through noise and distorted guitar and songs that are sadder than they look.

The other live announcement is smaller and I think it's bigger. Fortress Festival in Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, is giving its dungeon synth stage two full days at the 2027 edition, May 29 and 30, and among the names on it is Erang, playing live. Worldwide debut. First time ever.

Erang has been making dungeon synth since 2012 and has never played a show. Not a small tour, not a rare appearance. Never. Fourteen years of records made by a man alone in a room, and next May he's going to stand in the theatre room of a Victorian spa building in Scarborough and do it in front of people. He said this music is all his life and he gives everything he has to it. Also on that stage: Wraith Knight, Spectral Castle, Hole Dweller, Lord Bakartia, DragonKeep, and Atlantean Sword, back after cancelling this year.

Dungeon synth isn't synthwave. It's the cousin who lives in the woods. But it's the same instinct, a person with cheap gear building somewhere to go, and if you've never gone down that particular hole, a two day stage full of it is as good a doorway as you'll get.

The deep cut

Dark Entries has a reissue coming on August 28 that I'd like you to know about now, because these sell out and then cost money.

Opéra De Nuit formed in Valréas, in the south of France, in 1982. In their entire existence they released two EPs, one in 1984 and one in 1986, and a single album in 1988. That's it. Thirteen tracks is the complete works of a band that lasted six years, which is a sentence that gets sadder the longer you look at it. Originals go for three figures when they turn up.

The part that made me sit up: some of it was mixed by Dan Lacksman of Telex.

If that name doesn't land, Telex were the Belgian trio who in 1979 covered "Rock Around the Clock" at roughly funeral speed on purpose, and who went to Eurovision in 1980 hoping to finish last. They didn't even get that. Portugal gave them ten points and they finished nineteenth, and their own line about it is that Portugal decided otherwise. Finding Lacksman's hands on a tiny French coldwave record from a town of nine thousand people is what keeps me clicking through label pages at midnight.

Thirty dollars for the double LP. The label points at "Annabella," "Boris Transylvania Camp" and "Karen Lloyd." I've heard the first one. It sounds like a rehearsal room with a cold floor and it's wonderful.

This is the stuff I mean when I say synthwave didn't come from nowhere. Everybody wants a lineage that runs Vangelis, Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, done. The actual DNA has a lot more of this in it: a band from a small French town in 1984 with a drum machine and one good idea, pressing a short run and then going and getting jobs.

Pixels and polygons

Let's do the promise first, since I've been bad at these.

Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns comes out Thursday, August 13. I told you last issue I'd have played it by now. It's Sunday and the game is out Thursday, so what I've done is read a calendar wrong in the other direction for once, which at least demonstrates range. The date is locked on the Steam page. There's still no price anywhere, not on Steam, not on GOG, four days out. That is a strange way to sell a thing.

Here's what's actually in it, from the publisher's own material. Three modes. Retro Mode is the 1986 Amiga original with quality of life fixes. Classic Mode is the modern reimagining. Kingdom Mode is new, and Kingdom Mode is a roguelite deck builder with dice combat, where the army units you pick set your starting dice and the tactic cards get played turn by turn.

I have a standing complaint, declared in issue one, that everything eventually becomes a roguelite deck builder. Forty years later they got to Robin Hood. I'd like it noted that I called this, and also that I'm going to buy it, because being right and being immune are different conditions.

While we wait: a game called Retrowave 2 came out Monday, and I'm obliged to cover it the way a local paper covers the guy who opens a diner named after the town. Sequel to the 2020 endless driver. Eighties supercar, infinite neon highway, fifteen cars, over fifty synthwave tracks and a loader for your own music. The new thing is that the road now has curves in it. The original one was famously, gloriously straight.

Five dollars, three seventy five on launch discount. The store page describes the appeal as nostalgia for an era players either didn't know or that never existed, which is the most self aware sentence I've read on a Steam page and probably the truest description of this entire genre.

Now the good part of the week.

There's a new game for the Commodore Amiga. Not a port, not a re release, a new game, built for AGA machines, launched with a trailer on Wednesday. It's called Hyper Runner, from Raster Wizards, and it's an antigravity racer with OutRun's bones: five stages, each ending in a two way fork, which shakes out to sixteen route combinations. Five ships, twelve pilots, and the pilot you choose actually changes top speed, acceleration, handling and shield, so it's a stat system rather than a costume. Boost meter that refills itself, pickups for hull and seconds. Music by Mike Richmond. It runs on real AGA hardware, on CD32, on FPGA boards, on emulators.

My Amiga 500 died in a basement flood in 1998 and I'm sitting here doing arithmetic about what a used A1200 costs.

Two things about that release. The first is that the physical jewel case CD comes out September 6 and gets handed over in person at an Amiga day in Spoleto, Italy, which is the most 1994 sentence I've typed in a while and I mean that with love. The second is on the itch page, in the tags, in small letters: no generative AI was used.

Two issues ago I said the thing I wanted was an ingredients list. Not a ban, not a purity test, just a label, so that a person who cares can choose and a person who doesn't can carry on. Here it is, unprompted, on a hobby project for a computer from 1992. It cost them one line. I'd like the rest of the industry to notice how cheap that was.

The Amiga had a second good week, too. Worms: The Director's Cut, the 1997 Amiga exclusive version, got an official expansion on Friday for the series' thirtieth anniversary, from Andy Davidson, who created Worms in the first place. Forty plus new levels, fifty plus sound sets, ten landscape types, a browser tool for making your own, and a nine track remix album. Free. Some of the levels came from Amiga demoscene groups, including maps built around Red Dwarf and Ruff 'n Tumble. A man came back to a twenty nine year old version of his own game and gave everybody a present.

Speaking of anniversaries with better manners than most: Quake turned thirty on Thursday and id gave away a nineteen map campaign. Dawn of the Machine, built by MachineGames, free to anybody who owns the 2021 remaster, with a new soundtrack, a new deathmatch map, remixed monsters and weapon variants including a ricochet laser cannon.

The reason it belongs in this magazine is Trent Reznor, who scored the original in 1996 and sent a video message to QuakeCon. On Wolfenstein: "I went out and bought a PC just to play it." On Doom: "It was like a bomb went off. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no." And then he put it in terms that made me stop the video and rewind it, which is a thing you can still do: he said it felt parallel to what he was trying to do with music by misshaping things.

It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no.

That's the whole 1996 basement in one line, and it applies to about nine tenths of the music this magazine covers.

Nine Inch Nails put out Quake merch the same day. Most of it was gone within hours. There was a replica ammo crate keychain that makes noise, which I looked at for longer than a 47 year old should look at a keychain.

One more, and it's the best pure hardware story of the year so far. Project Neon, a modern 16 bit shmup from FULLSET, hit Steam Friday at twenty dollars and went up on Xbox, Apple, Google Play and PlayStation the same week, with Switch on the 13th. Fine. Here's the part: the physical editions include Neo Geo AES and MVS carts, a Dreamcast disc, an N64 cart, and a Sega Saturn version on cartridge. Not a disc. A cart. Which makes it the first game ever released exclusively on a Saturn cartridge, in the year 2026, thirty two years after the console launched.

The Neo Geo AES edition is five hundred and eighty Australian dollars and I'm not the audience for that. But somebody is going to end up with a Saturn cart carrying a 2026 copyright date, and in forty years a kid will pull it out of a box and have no idea what he's holding.

The art desk

I said I'd try to get Andrew Tremblay on the phone. I tried. I did not get Andrew Tremblay on the phone.

In fairness to him, he told the internet in May that his workload was slammed and he wasn't taking new gigs, and a magazine nobody has heard of asking for an hour of his time is a new gig. I sent a polite note into the void the way you do. If he ever answers, you'll get the whole thing and I'll be unbearable about it for a week.

What I did get, poking around, is a correction I owe you.

Last issue I told you Tremblay is in Asbury Park, New Jersey. That came off his Behance, where he says it himself. His Bandcamp, for the music he makes as STRNGR, says Saco, Maine. Those are two different places roughly four hundred miles apart, and I printed one of them like it was a settled fact when what I actually had was one of two conflicting self descriptions from a guy who has never sat for an interview.

So: I don't know where he lives, and neither, apparently, does the internet. What I do know is verified and unchanged. He drew GosT's tour posters and shirts. He did the MOTOKO covers for NRW and the Magnavolt collaboration in February. His Instagram is open and it's worth your time.

Here's my actual position on this, and it's why I keep the art desk instead of just running album covers. This scene's images are made by people, and the people are findable, and almost nobody bothers to find them. It took me four hours to establish that I don't know what state a working artist lives in. That's not a failure of research. That's the whole problem in miniature.

We know the discography of every producer with three hundred monthly listeners and we can't name the person who drew the thing we set as our wallpaper.

So let me name one, and this one you've already been looking at.

Robert Sammelin. If you have bought a boutique Blu-ray or a limited VHS in the last two years there is a real chance he painted the sleeve. Scroll his portfolio and it's a wall of them: Redneck Zombies, Mother's Day, D.A.R.Y.L., Eight Eyes, the Forgotten Gialli boxes, the Riddle of Fire soundtrack, a Godzilla LP. Airbrush logic, hot rim light, a face split by a knife blade. The video store shelf, done properly, by somebody who understands it was never about irony.

The part that got him the column, though, is that he's self taught. Born 1978 in Kiruna, a mining town above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, and he lives in Stockholm now with his wife and son. His day job is Concept Art Director at Embark Studios, and before that he spent years at DICE, where he made concept art and designed the Battlefield key art. So the man who draws the covers of the physical media revival spends his working hours on the future of video games, and does the video store at night.

Four of his covers went out on August 1 alone, including Bloody Psycho and the light box VHS edition of Twin Cheeks. He's the most credited cover artist on Vinegar Syndrome's shelf and I'd guess most of you have never heard the name, which is the problem I was complaining about one paragraph ago, so at least I'm consistent.

His site is robertsammelin.com and his Instagram is open. Go and look.

Rewind culture

I bought the ticket.

Tickets for the Transformers: The Movie 4K return went on sale Friday, September 17 through 21, and I was on the site early like a man with a job he takes seriously. I have a seat for opening night. It is not a good seat. I got the aisle in the back third because the middle went first, which tells you the answer to the question I asked last issue about whether anybody still cares about a forty year old cartoon: yes, and they were faster than me.

I've made my peace with it. Back third, aisle, 4DX, which means the chair will be actively assaulting me while Optimus Prime dies. My mother took me to see this in a theater in 1986 when I was seven and it emotionally rearranged me. In September a machine is going to shake me by the shoulders while it happens again, and I paid extra for that.

Then on Saturday, the actual fortieth anniversary of the film, Shout! Factory announced the disc, and I have opinions.

The 40th Anniversary Edition comes out October 13. It's a DVD. One disc, region 1, 85 minutes, catalogue number 1000863899. Amazon has it at $19.98 and Shout's own store has it at $15.99, which is the first time I've seen a studio undercut Amazon on its own anniversary release, so at least somebody in that building is awake.

The extras are all there and they're the good ones: the Nelson Shin and Flint Dille and Susan Blu commentary, the full 'Til All Are One documentary with Gregg Berger and Neil Ross and Dan Gilvezan and Stan Bush and Vince DiCola, the archival featurettes including Death of Optimus Prime, the animated storyboards, the trailers. Early coverage read the 85 minute runtime as a sign this was a bare bones cash grab. It isn't. The legacy package is intact.

Two problems.

The first is that the 85 minutes is the theatrical cut, and nothing in the packaging or the product data mentions the brand new post credits chapter that Hasbro made for the September theatrical run. On the evidence available, that scene stays in cinemas. Which is either a clean argument for buying a ticket or a very old trick, depending on how generous you're feeling.

The second is that it's a DVD. In 2026. For a fortieth anniversary, of a film that is being sold to theaters right now on a fresh 4K restoration. The 35th got a steelbook. There is no announced Blu-ray, no 4K disc, nothing dated, and Shout hasn't said a word either way. So the plan, as it currently stands, is to restore the film in 4K, put it in theaters in 4K, and then sell you a standard definition disc for the anniversary.

I'm going to buy it and I'm going to be annoyed the entire time. They know that. It has worked on me since roughly 1996 and there's no reason for them to stop.

Elsewhere, with a lot less noise around it, William Orbit died. His family confirmed it on the 6th; he died at home on July 23, at 69, and no cause was given. Born William Wainwright, made the Strange Cargo records, produced Madonna's Ray of Light, worked with Blur and Pink and Britney Spears, and did that Barber Adagio record that ended up in every club in 1999 whether it wanted to be there or not.

He's not synthwave. He's upstream of it. Ray of Light is a pop record where the synthesizers are allowed to be strange and wet and slightly wrong, and a lot of people who make the music in this magazine learned what a pad could do from a record their older sister owned. Two weeks, two enormous holes in electronic music. I don't have a tidy thing to say about that.

One nicer piece of housekeeping: Steinberg turned thirty years of VST into a giveaway on Friday. Five of their original plugins, free, updated to VST3 for current Windows and macOS. Neon, the virtual analog synth that shipped with Cubase VST 3.7. VB-1, the bass. Model E, which used to be CS-40. The LM-7 drum machine. Karlette, the tape delay.

VST is thirty and it's the reason any of this exists. Before it, making this music meant a room and money. After it, a laptop and time. Every bedroom producer in the counter list below is downstream of a format decision somebody made in 1996. Go get the free tape delay and put something through it.

Static

• Remember UrbX? The 16 bit Kickstarter I promised you numbers from twice, then promised I'd stop promising? It was supposed to launch on July 30. As of tonight the page still says "Launching soon" with a Notify Me button. It had 871 followers when I checked on August 4. It has 914 now. Forty three more people signed up to be told about a thing that continues not to happen, and honestly, same.
• MiSTer FPGA had the week of its life. Update All 2.9 brought a Dreamcast core called DreamSTer, described by people who'd know as very rough but running better than anyone expected, plus Quake and Duke Nukem 3D cores that run off your own PAK0.PAK and DUKE3D.GRP, plus a Mega VGM Drive core that plays your own VGM files through a real Mega Drive YM2612. That last one is a toy and I want it badly.
• Kitrinx released a Virtual Boy core for MiSTer on Thursday and it might be the best that machine has ever looked. Savestates, cheats, CRT output, and 3D through side by side for projectors or anaglyph red and blue for anything else, with a slider to dial back the separation when the ghosting gets nasty. Nintendo's biggest embarrassment is now better preserved than most of its hits.
• Illformed made Glitch 2 free on Monday in memory of its developer, Kieran Foster, who worked as dblue. The tribute posted with it is worth reading in full and includes the line that he showed up for the Renoise forum, for the users and the makers, and that people will be haunted by his helpfulness. That's a better obituary than most people get in a newspaper.
• Anbernic put out the RG SP on Tuesday, sixty five dollars, and the notable choice is what they removed: no joysticks at all. It's a Game Boy Advance SP clamshell that has decided to only be good at 2D, and I think that's the correct decision for a machine at that price.
• Piko dumped three nineties console oddities onto Steam on Thursday at eight dollars apiece, and one of them is Wetrix, the 1998 N64 puzzler where you don't stack blocks, you sculpt terrain. You raise walls to dam falling water and dig pits to hold lakes and you lose when the land floods. Nobody has ever made another one, because how would you.
• Evercade is putting the whole classic Doom saga on one cartridge on October 30, nine items including SIGIL, SIGIL II and a new deathmatch pack built for local play. Twenty five pounds, or two hundred for a Doom themed Nexus capped at three thousand units. Three selectable soundtrack mixes, which is the detail that tells you somebody there cares.
• A boutique outfit called 33 Games is pressing Gremlin's 1993 colony sim Utopia onto a licensed SNES cartridge in November. Sixty pounds for the cart and a restored 68 page manual, a hundred and thirty if you want the Hyperkin SNES Mouse in custom packaging, and six hundred for the Founder's Edition, of which three exist on planet Earth. Somewhere right now there are four people deciding how badly they want one.
• This Week In Retro's episode 280 went up Saturday under the headline "Gremlin Graphics Is Back," and their news list also carries a working build of DOOM for the Commodore 64, which is a sentence I'd have called a lie in 1993.

The counter list

Five for the week, in playing order. Same principle as the top fives I used to staple to rental receipts, except this one nobody hands back.

• Jorja Chalmers & Johnny Jewel, "Crying Game." Play the drumless mix second and hear what the drums were hiding.
• Isidor, "Turbo Fighter." Written for the last corner, not the drive.
• WLDV, "I Like This World." Free, from Bilbao, on the day he could have charged. Go overpay.
• METTASTATION, "Exefication." Yes it's a made up word about a body conveyor. Yes the guitar solo earns it.
• Opéra De Nuit, "Annabella." Recorded in a French town of nine thousand people while I was in grade school, out again on the 28th.

That's issue four, filed on a Sunday, from an attic that was briefly habitable and has already gone back to being an attic. The window is open. It isn't helping anymore.

Next week: Defender of the Crown comes out Thursday and this time the calendar is on my side, so I'll have played it and I'll tell you what Kingdom Mode actually is instead of what the press release says it is. If a price ever appears I'll tell you that too, though at this point I'd settle for a rumor. And the Bandcamp Friday number goes back in the drawer until September 4, which gives all of us three and a half weeks to recover our finances and our judgment.

One last thing about the damage report. Of the eleven things I bought on Friday, the one I keep going back to is the free one, from a guy in Bilbao who finished some old tracks and gave them away on the single day of the year he could have kept every cent. I've spent a lot of words in this magazine on why physical media matters and why paying for music matters, and I stand by all of it. But the record of the week was free, made by somebody who felt like finishing it, and that's the part of this that no storefront invented and no storefront can take.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty