The ingredients list finally showed up | The Rewind Vol. 5

Sunday, on time, two in a row. I'm not going to say anything else about it. Last time I mentioned my own punctuality out loud the next issue came out on a Tuesday, so as far as I'm concerned this paragraph never happened and you and I have an understanding.

The attic went back to being the attic. Ninety one degrees up here Thursday afternoon, both fans running, and I did the thing where you angle one fan at the window and the other one at your face and pretend it's a system. My sister's kids were over on Wednesday and the older one asked why I don't just work downstairs. I've been asked harder questions by adults and had better answers.

Anyway. I owe you a game I promised twice and never delivered, so that's first. After that there's a Kickstarter that lived for about thirty hours, and a fight that broke out in five different rooms this week about whether you have to tell anybody what your work is made of.

The promise, kept, mostly

Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns came out Thursday, August 13, exactly when the store page said it would, which after three weeks of me misreading calendars in both directions feels like a personal favor.

The price finally exists. Twenty dollars, nineteen ninety nine, with fifteen percent off at launch, so sixteen ninety nine. Same number on Steam, same number on GOG. Black Tower Basement made it, Nordcurrent Labs published it, and it went up on Switch the same day. Windows only on PC. No Mac, no Linux.

Three modes, and I said last week I'd tell you what they actually are instead of what the press release calls them. Retro Mode is the 1986 Amiga game with the sharp corners sanded off. Classic Mode is the remake, new art, reworked systems. Kingdom Mode is the new one, and Kingdom Mode is procedurally generated maps, dice, unlockable abilities, difficulty tiers, which is to say it's the roguelite deck builder I predicted in issue one and complained about in issue four.

I played Retro Mode first, because of course I did, and sat there for a minute waiting for a disk drive to make a noise that was never going to come. Then Kingdom Mode for a couple of hours, which is the mode they clearly want you to live in.

Here's the part I didn't expect. As I'm typing this it has 148 reviews on Steam and the rating is Mixed. A hundred and three people liked it, forty five didn't. That's a forty year old crown jewel of the Amiga library, revived by people who obviously love it, and week one the room shrugged.

I've read a pile of those reviews and I think the split is about what the word "intact" means. The marketing says everything that made the original special is intact, the ruleset, the pacing, the atmosphere. The trouble is that the thing which made Defender of the Crown special in 1986 was mostly that nothing else looked like it. Cinemaware built a game out of paintings when everybody else was building them out of blocks, and if you were a kid standing in a store with your face two feet from a monitor, that was the whole argument. You can restore the paintings. You can't restore the year.

I like it. I'm also not going to pretend the forty five are wrong.

This week in music

Something happened to the release calendar this week and it took me until Friday to see it. Almost nothing worth your time came out on a label. Go down the list of what landed between Monday and Sunday and it's page after page of artists with no imprint, no distributor, no PR person, just a Bandcamp account and a Friday.

The best of them is Love On A High Floor by Bunny X, out Friday on Aztec Records, and that one does have a label, so my thesis lasted four sentences. Eleven tracks, eight pounds fifty. The concept is 1980s Wall Street excess, glass towers and the cracks in the glass, which could easily be a costume and isn't, because the record has enough sad in it to earn the champagne.

Read the credits though. That's where this gets fun. SelloRekt/LA Dreams wrote and produced five of the eleven. Gosteffects has his hands on eight. There's an engineer the credits call a Grammy winner, Tony Lake, who both writes and plays the guitar solo on track six. And Mary Hanley, who used to be in the band, comes back to sing on track four. A guest list looks nothing like that. That's a scene turning up for one of its own.

SelloRekt turning up again is worth a note. I wrote about a reissue of his last week and here he is nine days later writing half of the best record of this one. The guy's been at it since NewRetroWave was uploading him in 2013 and he is somehow still in the middle of the frame.

Second favorite, and the one I've had on the most: Makeup and Vanity Set put out the soundtrack to a film called The New Way Program on Thursday. Fifteen tracks, five dollars. Matthew Pusti scored it, Billy Senese directed it, and the whole record is presented as recovered VHS tapes from an eighties self improvement program, the segments split across five cassettes.

You want to know why I bought that inside of a minute. In 1996 a woman brought a box of tapes to the counter she'd found cleaning out her father's house and asked if we could tell her what was on them. Six unlabeled VHS-C tapes and one commercially printed one, some seminar thing with a man in a gray suit on the cover, all teeth. We ran a couple. The unlabeled ones were a kid's birthday. Nobody ever came back for the box. It sat under the register for two years.

Then there's LorD and Master's Platform: Volume Two on RetroSynth, out of Deptford, New Jersey. Ten tracks, nine dollars, and all of it is Pet Shop Boys, rebuilt from nothing, played back at you through a synthwave rig. It works better than it has any business working, and a couple of those arrangements are killer. But the best thing on the page is the copyright line, which name checks the Pet Shop Boys Partnership and Parlophone Records, because somebody did the paperwork. A covers record in this scene with actual clearances on it. I've seen major label reissues with worse housekeeping.

Karl Casey gave away twenty five tracks on Wednesday under the title Extreme Essentials Vol. 1, free, and the description doesn't contain one sentence about the music. It's a licensing FAQ. His stuff is copyright safe, credit him as music by Karl Casey at White Bat Audio, don't put vocals on it and sell it, don't strip the score out of your film and sell that separately. Twenty five songs packaged as a terms of use agreement.

I brought him up two issues ago for putting a no AI statement on his own work. Same guy, same instinct. He's spent years scoring other people's YouTube videos for nothing and he's figured out that the useful thing to hand a stranger is not a mood, it's a set of rules.

The NewRetroWave channel had a good week too, if you still watch premieres the way I still watch premieres. DEADLIFE put up "Paladin" on Tuesday, the second single from the new project, with cover art by FOGRA and design by SynthStar, both credited on the upload, which I notice because most channels can't be bothered. Missing Words got his first premiere on the main channel Friday with "Eyes Wide Shut," off a record called Serotonin, and it's the good kind of chillsynth, the kind that sounds like the parking lot after. TONXY's "Polygon" landed midweek.

Also, and this is petty of me, they re uploaded that Isidor track I wrote about last week because the first one cut out partway through. The note on it just says the first upload cut out abruptly, apologies all. Somewhere a person with a good ear had a bad Monday, fixed it, and said sorry to nobody in particular. That's the whole channel in one line.

Quick ones, because there were three hundred releases this week and I have a life, allegedly.

Silver Night Operator's The Long Curve, seventeen tracks, seven dollars, out of Seattle, and the store page sells it for coding, focus and the long night drive. The tags are coding music, deep work, focus music, study music. So that's the moment synthwave sat down in the lo fi beats chair, and I want to be annoyed and can't quite get there, because the record's good and because "the long night drive" is the only one of those four use cases I've ever had. There's a line on the page: nobody is from here. I've thought about it more than I meant to.

Transit Void in the UK put out a five track EP called Glow on Saturday for fifty pence. Superjupiter in Oslo put out seven versions of one song for nineteen Norwegian kroner, about two bucks, and called it a complete maxi single, which is the honest ancestor of the slowed and reverb thing I was grumbling about last week. Twelve inch culture did the same job forty years ago and nobody accused it of being a content strategy.

And Red Hex put out three albums on Saturday. Twenty six tracks. That's four albums and thirty five songs in nine days from one artist, after the sixteen dollar one I mentioned last week. No credits on any of the pages, no about text, nothing. I don't know what to do with that, so I'm just going to write it down and let it sit there.

Nine hundred and ninety nine dollars

Dungeon synth had the strangest week of anybody, and I need to explain a trick to you.

On Friday a label called Edge of the Wild put up A Knight in Exile by Reyhan, ten tracks, and priced the digital album at nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. On the same day a UK label called Echoic Murk put up a Granite Skull double at a thousand pounds.

Neither of those is a typo and neither is a joke about how much art is worth. Read the text under the price and both of them tell you to go buy the record on the artist's own Bandcamp page, at the normal price, so the artist gets the money. The label page is a shop window with an unbuyable object in it, pointing next door.

Video stores did this. The display box on the shelf was empty and the tape lived behind the counter, and every so often somebody would carry an empty box up to me like it was a purchase. Same energy. Except the reason for it here is that the label wants the sale to go to the guy who made it, which is a strange and sort of beautiful thing to build a storefront around.

Two different labels landing on the same solution in the same week tells you it wasn't showmanship. It's a workaround, and workarounds are what a scene builds when the tools it has don't fit the job. Reyhan's cassettes come September 7. Granite Skull's run is ten copies with a reversible j-card, which at that scale is less a pressing than a handshake.

Elsewhere in the woods: Skeleton Mage in Sweden gave away An 8-Bit Fantasy Adventure, ten tracks, name your price, music by Miguel Amarok, cover art by Gustave Doré, who died in 1883 and is therefore the most reliable collaborator in this genre. The page ends with a disclaimer that a childlike sense of wonder is not included. And Halberd's Depths of the Lich Lord came out Tuesday for a dollar with the pixel artist and the monster illustrator both credited by name and linked. A one dollar album with a proper credits page. Some of you with distribution deals could take a look at that.

The ingredients list

Now the argument, because it broke out in five rooms at once this week and none of the people in those rooms were talking to each other.

Room one. Beatport announced on Thursday that it's expanding its deal with a fraud detection outfit called Beatdapp to catch and reject fully or mostly AI generated tracks when they're delivered, and to notify rights holders when it does. AI assisted music is still allowed if a person did most of it, and those releases get tagged at ingestion so the curation staff can see what they're looking at. Their CEO, Matt Gralen, drew the line where I'd draw it: there's a difference between a tool that assists human creation and a system that replaces it entirely. They also published survey numbers from their own users, and the one that stuck with me is that eight percent said they're currently open to playing AI generated tracks.

Room two. A developer named EstebanPdN put out native 3DS ports of Mario Kart 64 and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap this week, dual screen, touch controls, the works. The Minish Cap port lists Anthropic's Claude as a contributor. The Mario Kart port doesn't. Same person, same week, one credited and one not, and the credited one is the one that got him yelled at.

Nobody is obligated to download it or play it. I just know that a lot of people are enjoying this, maybe even for the first time.

Room three. Spyro the Dragon now runs natively on PC through a project called OpenPete, named after Spyro's development codename, built partly on an AI assisted recompiler. A speedrunner vouching for it first said no AI was involved, then walked it back to being pretty confident the developer wasn't vibecoding the thing, then added that if he was using Claude, which he hasn't disclosed, it's not that big a deal. That's three positions in one paragraph. The repo isn't public either, and the stated reason is that the source tree has copyrighted memory dumps in it, which is its own kind of honesty.

Room four. Michael Cranford, who designed and programmed The Bard's Tale, is finishing a game he announced at the end of Maze Master in 1983. Forty three years. He's writing it in 6502 assembly, native on the C64, inside the real machine's limits, and there's a playable demo up now. He'll show it at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October. And the trailer on the website is generative AI, and it's not good AI either, it stutters. A man hand writes assembly for a 1982 computer and lets a robot cut the trailer.

And then there's a Bandcamp page. Air404's Rainbow Court, out Thursday, twelve tracks, and the entire description is: fantasy synth, made entirely by a human, no AI was used, smiley face. That's it. That's the whole pitch.

Two issues ago I said the thing I wanted wasn't a ban or a purity test, it was an ingredients list. Last week a hobby project for a 1992 computer put one on its itch page and I said it cost them one line. This week it showed up in five places at once, and here's what I actually learned from that: it's arriving from the bottom. The guy giving away twelve tracks labeled his. The guy on the 3DS labeled his and got kicked for it. The recompiler didn't, and the trailer definitely didn't, and Beatport, a company with lawyers, is the last one through the door and is being called brave for it.

A label is only worth something if it goes on the thing that's easy to hide, too. The music, sure. Also the trailer, the key art, the store page copy, the fake nostalgia in the fake liner note. I'd rather know. That's all I've ever asked here, and I notice that the people already doing it are, almost without exception, the ones with the least to lose.

Out of the house

Best announcement of the week and it isn't close. Brian Williams, who's been making Lustmord records since some of you were a rumor, has formed a duo with Dave Lombardo. Lustmord Lombardo. The album's called The Pulse of Atoms, seven tracks, October 2 on Ipecac, with the first single out since Tuesday. Clear and smoke vinyl, CD, digital.

Williams describes it as the sound of the birth of the universe and the death of the universe, and then adds, helpfully, that it's not rock and roll. Lombardo says it's so different from anything else he's done that he's proud of it, and when the guy who played on Reign in Blood tells you a record is different, you clear an evening.

Fortress Festival filled in the rest of its dungeon synth stage, and it's now two full days in the theatre room at Scarborough Spa, May 29 and 30, 2027. Erang plays the first live show of his career there. Wraith Knight's UK debut, Spectral Castle's first live performance at all, plus Hole Dweller, Atlantean Sword, Lord Bakartia and DragonKeep, with Emperor headlining the main bill. As of the announcement there were about a hundred and fifty tickets left for the weekend. Erang, on doing it after fifteen years of not doing it: this music is all my life, and I give everything I have to it.

Bragolin, the Dutch darkwave project, is doing thirty North American dates from September 3 to October 11, the first time he's ever played over here, with Carrellee opening. The stat that made me laugh is that his most streamed song is one that went viral seven years after it came out. Nothing about that scene's economics makes sense and I've stopped expecting it to.

And Soundedit in Łódź, Poland, October 23 to 27, has Marc Almond, Wolfgang Flür, Hugh Cornwell and The Wolfgang Press on the same bill. Soft Cell, Kraftwerk and The Stranglers in one building in one week. If any of you are within driving distance of Poland in October, go, and then write to me about it so I can be jealous properly.

One week after

Kavinsky was buried on Wednesday.

The service was at 10:30 at Saint Pierre de Montmartre, the way the family's notice said it would be, and the burial followed at Saint Vincent. Thomas Bangalter was there. Both halves of Justice, Sébastien Tellier, Pedro Winter, Quentin Dupieux, Gaspar Noé. The coffin came in to the theme from Jaws, which was reportedly his favorite piece of music, and I've been sitting with that detail all week. A man who made the definitive record about driving a car at night went out to John Williams making a two note joke about something under the water.

A number of outlets have now printed a cause of death. The most careful account I can read says it hasn't been officially established. So I'm going to do here what I did three weeks ago, which is nothing. His family knows. That's the correct number of people.

The art desk

No word from Andrew Tremblay. I said I'd tell you either way, so: either way.

This week's artist found me, sort of. On August 9 a poster showed up on Instagram, a Kickboxer 2 Blu-ray key art, and five days later Lionsgate officially announced the disc with that exact image on the front and a credit line reading "Artist: Marc Schoenbach." The man scooped a studio on his own release by most of a week.

Schoenbach works as Sadist Art Designs, out of New York, and his Instagram bio is a complete artist statement in nine words: movie poster designer, eighties and nineties enthusiast, left hand path. Six thousand two hundred and fifty one followers, which is roughly one for every person who's ever bought a Vestron slipcase and never wondered who drew it.

The disc itself is worth a paragraph. Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, 1991, directed by Albert Pyun, written by David S. Goyer before anybody knew who David S. Goyer was, starring Sasha Mitchell. Two discs, Dolby Vision, an Atmos track, ninety four minutes, out September 15 as number 41 in the Vestron Collector's Series. Three separate twenty minute interviews on it, including one with the cinematographer. That's a lot of care for a sequel whose main selling point in 1991 was that it existed.

What got Schoenbach the column is the range. Album covers and disc covers, same hands. He's got a new one landing August 21 for a Buffalo band called Cemetery Echo, who describe themselves as haunt and roll, and the credit on the record's page just says visuals by Sadist Art Design. Before that, the variant slipcover for the WNUF Halloween Special on Terror Vision, two thousand copies, for a film that's already a fake 1987 local news broadcast, so the assignment was to make a fake cover for a fake tape. There's a signed They Live giclée on his own site for ninety five dollars, and about a hundred and thirty five products on that site.

I've watched people pick tapes off a shelf for nine years, so let me tell you what a cover actually does. It doesn't describe the film. It makes a promise about the ninety minutes, and the good ones are honest about which promise they're making. Schoenbach's are honest. That's rarer than the airbrush.

Rewind culture

The book came.

Video Town, the Lunchmeat novel I ordered back in July and have been asking the mailbox about ever since, is here. Robert Freese wrote it, a hundred and ninety two pages, twenty dollars, first printing of two hundred and fifty copies. It's about a guy named Beck, a video store, a chain store moving in up the road, and a rental contest on Halloween night in 1987. I've read forty pages and I already know how it ends for the store, because I was there, but I'm going to enjoy the trip.

And now Lunchmeat has done the thing I would have paid double for. VIDEOHEAVEN, Alex Ross Perry's documentary about video stores, narrated by Maya Hawke, is out on VHS. Two tapes, black shells, a dual deck slipcase, a hundred and seventy three minutes, forty dollars. First pressing is a hundred copies.

A three hour documentary about video stores, released on the format, in an edition small enough that most of the people it's about won't get one. You could call that a gimmick. I'd call it the only correct decision available. I have a working AG-1980 ten feet from where I'm sitting and I'd like that machine to have something new to do before I'm done with it.

Meanwhile the disc labels had a week. Criterion announced November and The Right Stuff is finally getting 4K on the 24th, fifty dollars, new restoration supervised by Caleb Deschanel, who shot it, with the 70mm mix intact. Lynch's Wild at Heart comes a week earlier at the same price. Ignite started shipping the Bride of Re-Animator 4K, and the hundred and thirty dollar box includes a hand painted finger creature that doubles as a desk phone stand, which is either the best or worst object anybody will mail you this year, plus a new hour long documentary that's the actual reason to buy it.

The one nobody announced: The Fly turned forty on Saturday. Cronenberg, Goldblum, Geena Davis, Howard Shore's score, Chris Walas building the thing in the corner of your memory. Mel Brooks sent Cronenberg that script, which remains the best trivia in this paragraph. There is no 4K disc. Nobody has announced one. Forty years, one of the two or three best horror films of the decade, and the anniversary went by with repertory screenings and nothing on a shelf.

Two more for the calendar. Terminator 2 is back in theaters from August 28 through September 2, in 4K and in 3D, timed so that Judgment Day itself falls inside the run on the 29th. And Video Store Day is October 17, the sixteenth one, and the list of exclusives was supposed to be announced this month and still isn't out. I check that site more than is healthy.

Static

• UrbX launched. I want you to appreciate the shape of this. Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge put the 16 bit edition on Kickstarter Thursday, built around a physical Mega Drive cartridge, with a pitch about ownership: our gift is the cart, own it, hold it, keep it, it's yours forever. On Friday at 7:55pm they cancelled the campaign, citing an unforeseen issue with Kickstarter, and promised to relaunch soon. The page today says Launching soon again and shows 404 followers. I printed 914 last week. I don't know how to reconcile those two numbers and I'm not going to invent a reason, so take the 914 as suspect and this sentence as the correction.
• Somebody wrote new firmware for the Roland TR-808. Forty five years on. SuperOS-808 is free and open source and takes the patterns from 32 steps to 64 across four sections, adds per step probability, ratcheting, polymeter, swing, live reslicing, plus proper MIDI and a web based editor. You do have to replace the CPU with a modern board to run it. A drum machine from 1980 now has probability. Somewhere a Roland engineer is retired and smiling.
• Commodore is remaking the Suncom TAC-2 joystick, five colorways, thirty seven pounds, shipping in October, with a steel shaft where the original famously used a tire valve. Then the first eighty three orders got overcharged on shipping and the company refunded eleven dollars each and moved to flat nineteen dollar worldwide shipping. I don't love a lot of things about the revived Commodore, but publishing the number 83 is more transparency than most companies manage in a year.
• The Amiga lawsuits are over. Amiga Corporation settled with Hyperion, replacing the 2009 agreement that caused twenty years of grief, and signed a licensing deal with the new Commodore recognizing who owns what. Buried in Amiga's own statement: they still control the defunct Commodore entities' MAC address blocks and IP allocations. Somebody out there owns a piece of the internet's plumbing because of a computer company that died in 1994.
• David Perry is auctioning a two player Computer Space, the 1973 revision of the first arcade video game ever sold. Bidding closes on the 21st and was sitting at $6,748 when I looked. A blue single player one went for sixty nine thousand on the same site. His stated reason for selling: he ran out of space. That is the correct reason to sell anything.
• A modder called Deric Miller turned the 1986 Legend of Zelda into two player co-op for its fortieth birthday. Player two is Link's Shadow. Shared hearts, shared items, and Select swaps your item without opening the menu. At full health you throw twice as many sword beams as the game was ever balanced to survive, and you're also twice as easy to hit, which sounds about right for co-op with a friend.
• There's now a Wolfenstein style FPS on the Game Boy Color. It's called Wolf, it's two dollars, Shane McCafferty wrote the raycaster, and the enemies are solid black rectangles. I'm not going to pretend that looks good. I am going to point out that it runs.
• The EU's new packaging rules kicked in on the 12th, and the practical effect on you is that small labels shipping records across European borders now owe registration fees in each destination country, running from around three hundred and sixty euros a year up to fourteen hundred. Two small outfits have already stopped shipping to parts of the EU over it. If a European label you like drops international shipping this autumn with no explanation, that's why, and it isn't greed.

The counter list

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

• Bunny X, Love On A High Floor. Not one track, the whole first half, in the dark, all the way through.
• DEADLIFE, "Paladin." Second single off the new project, a banger, and the artwork by FOGRA deserves the credit it got.
• Missing Words, "Eyes Wide Shut." Chillsynth, and his first premiere on the main channel, which used to mean something and I've decided still does.
• Terminus, "Radiating From Siwenna." Named after an Asimov planet, and the page tells you it already came out once under a different name. Honest people, good song.
• Brutal Design, "Track 5." Sixth song on the album. Nobody renamed it. I love this scene.

That's issue five, filed on a Sunday from an attic where the thermometer says 88 and the fan says nothing. The Civic's air conditioning is still theoretical. I put it in print a month ago that next summer it either gets fixed or I rent something German, which means I've got eleven months to keep not doing anything about it, and I'm driving around with the windows down like it's 1994 in the meantime.

Next week: Remute is putting out a purple seven inch on the 20th, eleven euros eleven, no repress, which is a funny thing for a man who built his whole career pressing music onto Mega Drive cartridges.

I'll have played the Shadow Snare demo. And if the UrbX campaign relaunches I'll tell you, and if it doesn't I'll tell you that too, which is the same deal I made two issues ago and the only one I'm still confident I can keep.

Our gift is the cart. Own it. Hold it. Keep it. It's yours forever.

That's from the UrbX pitch, written by a man who has shipped real games since the eighties, about a cartridge you'd be able to hold in 2046 when every storefront that sold you anything this year is a 404. The campaign for it lasted about thirty hours. I don't think that's ironic. I think it's the whole business in one week: the thing worth keeping is easy to describe and hard to fund, and the people who understand that best are usually the ones doing it in a spare room with no label, no distributor, and a Bandcamp page that says a human made this.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty