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

I spent Friday night doing what I do most Friday nights, which is reading credits. Not the music, the credits. Who wrote track four, who mastered it, what it costs, whether the label bothered to put the year on it. Dana used to say I read a record like a lease. She wasn't wrong and I've stopped pretending it's a flaw.

This week the credits told a story before the music did. Go down the list of everything that came out between Monday and Sunday and almost none of it has a label on it. No imprint, no distributor, no PR person. A Bandcamp account and a Friday. Hold that thought, because it runs through the whole issue, and the one exception to it is also the best record of the week.

This week in music

Bunny X, Love On A High Floor, out Friday on Aztec Records, and yes, that's a label, so my thesis lasted one paragraph. Here's what it sounds like, by their own tags and by my ears: italo disco and eurodance bones under synthpop, the kind of record that has a glass of something in its hand. The concept is 1980s Wall Street excess, towers and the cracks in the towers, which could have been a costume and isn't, because there's enough sad in it to earn the champagne. Eleven tracks, £8.50. Third album from the New York duo, Abigail Gordon and Jenny Bates, and the physical is on demand through Elastic Stage, so nobody pressed a thousand and prayed.

Now the credits, because that's where this one gets good. SelloRekt/LA Dreams wrote and produced five of the eleven. Gosteffects, who is John Bourke, produces eight. Tony Lake, whom the page calls a Grammy winning engineer, co-writes three and plays the guitar solo on track six. And Mary Hanley, who used to be in the band, comes back to sing on "One Touch." 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. NewRetroWave was uploading that guy 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. By his own tags it's ambient and Berlin school, which means sequencers and drift, not drums, closer to the soundtrack end of what he does than the driving end. Fifteen tracks, $5, track titles like "Color Bars" and "Public Access Ch. 43." 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 that 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. The unlabeled ones were a kid's birthday. Nobody ever came back for the box. It sat under the register for two years.

LorD and Master's Platform: Volume Two, on RetroSynth, out of Deptford, New Jersey, is ten Pet Shop Boys songs rebuilt from nothing by one man, Daniel Graham, and played back through a synthwave rig. "It's a Sin," "Rent," "Domino Dancing," "Opportunities," and a couple of the lesser known ones, "Twentieth Century" and "Integral." It works better than it has any business working, and "Rent" in particular survives the trip, which is the one I was worried about. Ten tracks, $9. The best thing on the page, though, 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 25 darksynth 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, the big cinematic end of darksynth where he's lived for years, 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 just says the first upload cut out abruptly, apologies all. Somebody with a good ear had a bad Monday and fixed it.

Quick ones, because 187 things came out under the synth tags this week and I have a life, allegedly.

Silver Night Operator's The Long Curve, 17 tracks, $7, out of Seattle, and the page describes itself better than I could: rolling arpeggios, warm bass, a groove that never lifts off the road. An hour of it. Then it tells you what it's for: coding, focus, deep work, and the tags are coding music, study music, focus music. So that's the moment synthwave sat down in the lo fi beats chair, and I want to be annoyed and can't get there, because the record's good and "the long night drive" is the only one of those 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 50 pence, and the page sells it as late night dance floors under buzzing neon, which is at least a promise you can hold them to. Superjupiter in Oslo put out seven versions of one song for 19 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. Add the $16 album he put out on Bandcamp Friday and that's four albums and 35 songs in nine days from one artist. No credits on any of the pages, no about text, no description of the sound, nothing. I'm writing it down and leaving it there, because I can't tell you what I haven't been told.

The $999 album

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 $999. On the same day a UK label called Echoic Murk put up a Granite Skull double at £1,000.

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 here 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. The Reyhan, for the record, is the old school end of the genre by the label's own description: warbling synthesizers, heavily filtered percussion, classic medieval instrumentation, and they name Hole Dweller, Elric and the Skyrim soundtrack as the neighbors, which is about right. 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, and the title tells you the palette, chip tones doing castle music. 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 $1, chiptune dungeon synth with tracks named like a text adventure, "Slime Battle," "The Unhelpful Wizard," "The Last Bonfire," 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 counter list

Five records, playing order. I used to write these on the back of rental receipts, and the difference is that this one is going to outlive me on a server somewhere, which is a lot of pressure for a list.

• 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.

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.

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 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 says a record is different, you clear an evening.

Fortress Festival, which I told you about last week, named the whole dungeon synth bill: two days at Scarborough Spa, May 29 and 30, 2027. Erang's first live show is still the headline; the new names are Wraith Knight's UK debut, Spectral Castle's first show anywhere, Hole Dweller, Atlantean Sword, Lord Bakartia and DragonKeep, with Emperor on the main bill. About 150 tickets were left at the announcement.

Bragolin, the Dutch darkwave project, is doing 30 North American dates from September 3 to October 11, his first time over here, with Carrellee opening. His most streamed song 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 one bill. Soft Cell, Kraftwerk and The Stranglers in one building. If you're within driving distance of Poland in October, go, then write to me so I can be jealous properly.

Pixels and polygons

Promise first. 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. $19.99, with 15 percent off at launch, so $16.99. 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. On PC it's Windows only, no Mac, no Linux, and no Deck rating that I could find yet.

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 rebuilt rather than emulated, James Sachs' art and Jim Cuomo's score, which I told you in issue three and then managed to leave out of issue four. 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 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 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. 103 liked it, 45 didn't, about 70 percent, a rounding error from the next rating up, so read "Mixed" as a coin on its edge rather than a verdict. Still. A forty year old crown jewel of the Amiga library, revived by people who obviously love it, and week one the room didn't cheer.

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 45 are wrong.

Now UrbX, and I want you to appreciate the shape of this. Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge put the 16 bit edition on Kickstarter on Thursday, Amiga AGA and Mega Drive, built around a physical 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 it, citing an unforeseen issue with Kickstarter, and promised to relaunch soon. Real carts for real machines, for about thirty hours. 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 the cleanest explanation, that a cancelled campaign comes back as a fresh page with the count reset, is a guess, not a fact, so I'm not going to dress it up as one. Take the 914 as suspect and this paragraph as the correction.

Two smaller ones that belong here rather than at the bottom. A modder called Deric Miller turned the original Legend of Zelda into two player co-op in its fortieth year. 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 twice as easy to hit, which sounds about right for co-op with a friend. It's a patch on ROMhacking.net, so you bring your own dump, and whether it behaves on a flash cart or only in an emulator is the thing I'd check before I got excited.

And there's now a Wolfenstein style FPS on the Game Boy Color. It's called Wolf, it's $1.99 on itch, 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 on real hardware off a flash cart, on a machine from 1998, and that the page says raycasting where the news write up said ray tracing, which are two different decades and one letter apart.

The ingredients list

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

Room one. Beatport announced Thursday that it's expanding its deal with a fraud detection outfit called Beatdapp to reject fully or mostly AI generated tracks at delivery and notify the rights holders. AI assisted music is still allowed if a person did most of it, and those releases get tagged 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, which is a survey of Beatport users by Beatport about Beatport, so weigh it accordingly, 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, the map or the inventory on the bottom panel. You need a homebrewed 3DS and your own dump of each cartridge, and since the eShop closed in 2023, homebrew is the only door left into that machine anyway. 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, and the way these projects normally work is you supply your own disc image and the tool does the rest. 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.

Two more, shorter, and they point opposite directions. 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 assembly, native on the C64, inside the real machine's limits, there's a playable demo up now, and he'll show it at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October. And the trailer on the website is generative AI, and it stutters. A man hand writes assembly for a 1982 computer and lets a robot cut the trailer. Then there's a Bandcamp page, Air404's Rainbow Court, out Thursday, twelve tracks of what the tags call fantasy synth and fairy synth, ambient and soft, and the entire description is: made entirely by a human, no AI was used, smiley face. That's the whole pitch.

Two issues ago I asked for a label on the tin, an ingredients list, and said I didn't want a ban or a purity test. 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 everywhere 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.

I'll hold myself to the standard I set in issue three, when the Virtual Boy core I was praising turned out to credit AI for a big share of its own refactoring, right there in the readme, and I said the line isn't where either camp wants it. Still true. I'm not asking anybody to stop. I'm asking for the label to go 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. And I notice that the people already telling me are, almost without exception, the ones with the least to lose.

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. His account is open and his shop has a signed They Live giclée at $95.

The disc: Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, 1991, Albert Pyun directing, David S. Goyer's script before anybody knew the name, Sasha Mitchell in the lead. Out September 15 as number 41 in the Vestron Collector's Series, 94 minutes, three separate twenty minute interviews including the cinematographer. One thing about the spec sheet, and I'm reporting it rather than resolving it: Lionsgate's own listing says Blu-ray and Dolby Vision in the same breath, and those two don't normally share a disc, because Dolby Vision is a 4K feature. Either it's a UHD and somebody typed Blu-ray, or the Dolby Vision line is wrong. If you're buying it for the format, wait for a second source.

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, 2,000 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.

I 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, 192 pages, $19.99, first printing of 250 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, 173 minutes, $40. First pressing is 100 copies. The page says duplicated in NTSC and doesn't say SP or EP, which is the one spec that decides whether a hundred people are about to watch something lovely or something that looks like soup, and I'd like to know before the second pressing.

A three hour documentary about video stores, on the format, in an edition small enough that most of the people it's about won't get one. Call it a gimmick if you want. 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, $49.95, 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 $129.95 box includes a hand painted finger creature that doubles as a phone stand, 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 and nobody has announced one. It's a Fox title, and the Fox catalog lives under a roof that hasn't been in a hurry about its horror library, which applies to about thirty other films you own on DVD. Forty years, one of the best horror films of the decade, and the anniversary went by with repertory screenings and nothing on a shelf.

Two for the calendar. Terminator 2 is back in theaters August 28 through September 2, 4K and 3D, timed so Judgment Day falls inside the run on the 29th. And Video Store Day is October 17, the sixteenth, and the list of exclusives that was due this month still isn't out.

Static

• Somebody wrote new firmware for the Roland TR-808, a machine from 1980 that predates MIDI entirely. 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, a web based editor, and MIDI in and out for a box that never had any. Two things to know before you get excited. You have to replace the original 4 bit CPU with a modern board to run it. And the 808's sound is all analog circuitry, the CPU only sequences and fires triggers, so this changes what the machine can do and touches nothing about how it sounds. Tadao Kikumoto designed the thing forty six years ago. I hope somebody sends him the link.
• Commodore is remaking the Suncom TAC-2 joystick. Five colorways, $49.99, Atari 9 pin DE-9 on the end of a two meter cable, so it plugs into a C64, an Amiga, an Atari, anything with that port, and nothing with a USB socket. Direct metal contacts, no microswitches, like the original. Shipping is a flat $19 worldwide, so call it $69 to your door, and it ships in October. Commodore's page says the new steel shaft replaces the original's copper tire valve shaft, which is their claim about their own history and I'm putting it in their mouth, not mine. Also: the first 83 orders got overcharged on shipping and the company refunded $11 each and said so in public. I don't love everything 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 seventeen 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 their IP allocations. The MAC prefixes are trivia. The legacy IP space is not, and if anybody with a routing table can tell me how big that allocation is, my inbox is open, because that is the number in this story.
• David Perry, the Shiny Entertainment founder, is auctioning a two player Computer Space, the 1973 revision of the first arcade video game ever sold, on RR Auction. Bidding closes on the 21st and was sitting at $6,748 when I looked. A blue single player one went for $69,000 on the same site. His stated reason for selling: he ran out of space. That is the correct reason to sell anything.
• The EU's new packaging rules, the PPWR, kicked in on the 12th, and the part that reaches you is called extended producer responsibility, EPR. Small labels shipping records across European borders now owe registration in each destination country, running from around 360 euros a year up to 1,485 depending on the country. Two small sellers, Pikecraft and Valkyrie Parts, have already stopped shipping to parts of the EU over it and said why. If a European label you like drops international shipping this autumn with no explanation, that's why, and it isn't greed. The search terms are PPWR and EPR, if you run a label and want to know what you owe.

That's issue five. No thermometer reading this week, you've had three in a row and I can hear you scrolling. 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, €11.11, 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 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 in a spare room with no label, no distributor, and a Bandcamp page that says a human made this.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty