The paperwork is the art form now | The Rewind Vol. 6

Seven years I worked the overnight board at a classic rock station here, two in the morning until six, and the thing nobody tells you about that shift is what it does to your ears. At two you can hear everything. At four you can only hear whether a record means it. I've been out of that chair for ten years and I still test music that way, which is why I ended up in the driveway at one in the morning on Friday with the engine off, listening to a darksynth album about a collapsing empire and deciding it meant it.

That record is where we start, and then the week gets strange, because five separate stories turned out to be the same story wearing different clothes.

This week in music

DEADLIFE put out DREAD SAGA on the 21st, ten tracks, $10 for the digital, and it's on NewRetroWave Records rather than his own page. The label's tags are darksynth, dreamwave, synthpop and power, and the label's own line is that this is "his signature gritty-synth and bold melodies" pointed at "a new vision and aesthetic." What I hear is a record that keeps its bass low and its melodies high with almost nothing in the middle, so the whole thing has this hollow center you can drive through. Track five is "Paladin," which came out as a single on the 11th and which I flagged then without knowing what it was attached to. Now I do. There was no second single and no third. He put out one track and then the album, which used to just be called releasing a record.

The artwork is by FOGRA and the label prints that name, which is going to matter later in this issue. Digital is FLAC or MP3 through Bandcamp, no app required. Physical: two vinyl variants at $25.99, DEATHLESS and PALADIN, a red cassette at $12.99, a CD digipak at $14.99. When I looked, the DEATHLESS press had 49 left and the tape had 25. Buy it or don't, but don't tell me next month you were going to.

One flag, because I can't leave this kind of thing alone. The video on the NewRetroWave channel is called "I am Deathless." The track on the album is "I the Deathless." I opened both. Same song, two titles, and somewhere between the render and the upload somebody's fingers had an opinion.

Makeup and Vanity Set dropped a soundtrack on the 20th that I need you to sit down for. Brigador Killers, forty three tracks, $9.99. Not a highlight reel of a score, the score. Matthew Pusti's own description says the game "explodes into the world with nearly 4x as much music" as the first one, which shipped with twelve, and he describes what he was after as "aggressive intensity and icy cold digital synthesis." The tags say ambient, Berlin school, soundtrack. Track names like "Never Trust a Death Cult" and "Who Do We Kill?" and, my favorite, "Where's the Beef?" That's a man having a week at work.

The game shipped into Early Access on the 20th at $24.99, down to $22.49, sitting at Mixed with 378 reviews, 247 up and 131 down. Windows only, Steam Deck Playable rather than Verified, flagged for text you can't read and a gamepad that isn't on by default. Here's the part I keep chewing on: the Steam page names the composer, right there, "an original soundtrack scored by acclaimed musician Makeup And Vanity Set." A store page that names the man who wrote the music is rarer than it ought to be.

Now the record with the best paperwork of the year. Dark Entries is reissuing Opéra De Nuit on the 28th, and I put it on this list even though it's a reissue, because a French coldwave band that formed in 1982 and never got a proper release is exactly the kind of thing this magazine exists for. Thirteen tracks, $15 digital, $30 for the gatefold double LP. The label's own words: "frigid synths, jangly guitars, and sorrow-laden vox," and the page points you at "Annabella" and "Karen Lloyd" specifically. Recorded at ICP in Brussels between 1986 and 1988, with three tracks from a garage studio in 1984, remastered last year by Anne-Marie Suenram.

Read that credit list. Vocals, guitar, bass, drums, synth, a guest vocal on track seven, two engineers, three mixing credits split by track number, a producer, the logo artist, the photographer, the layout designer, the mastering engineer with a year attached. Thirteen songs by a band that mostly failed, documented better than most records that succeeded. The $60 test pressing is already gone.

Oceanside85 and SelloRekt / LA Dreams have a record together called Strong Heart, out the 21st, nine tracks, $9. Their description promises "lush, atmospheric synth pads, driving basslines, and deeply emotional vocal hooks," which is a fair account of dreamwave in one breath. Chelsea Owen writes the words and sings them, Kevin Montgomery does the synths and the production, Johan Peeps masters, Maya Jovanovic did the cover and her Instagram is right there in the credits.

SelloRekt / LA Dreams is Kevin Montgomery, and I never printed his name last issue when I told you SelloRekt wrote and produced five of the eleven tracks on the Bunny X record. Same man, nine days later, doing warm pads and a mid tempo kick under somebody else's voice. That's not a scene having a moment, that's a scene having a session musician, and I mean it as a compliment. Vinyl is $40 on preorder, CD is $13, and they print the shipping: $8 inside the US, $16 outside it.

StarLink's She Is Here came out on Girlfriend Records on the 21st, five tracks, $5, chillsynth and dreamwave by the tags, and the description is about "a long-awaited reunion under a neon-lit sky." Lovely. Fine. Not why we're here.

We're here because the physical edition is a 3.5 inch floppy disk. Ten dollars. Assorted random colors. Three of the five tracks, at what the page calls "an 8-16k variable bitrate," so those warm lo-fi pads arrive sounding like a phone call about warm lo-fi pads, plus a tracklist with ASCII art on it. This is a worse way to hear music than every other way, and I've already worked out where the drive would go.

Quick ones. Aztec Records assembled Pure Space Odyssey, Vol. 1 on the 21st, twenty tracks, twelve pounds, moving "from atmospheric instrumentals and cosmic ballads to widescreen electronic journeys." Good comp. Nobody is credited with mastering it or drawing the cover.

And Remute's purple seven inch landed on the 20th at 11,11 euros, exactly as advertised: two tracks, a live "Red Eyes" from Gamescom with the chiptune running hot over a four on the floor kick, plus a bonus called "Research Eyes." I told you it was coming and I told you the page said limited, no repress. Both true. It also has 85 copies left, so limited turns out to mean limited, not gone by lunchtime, and I'd rather report that than let you think you missed something.

One more before the list, and it's the one that made me sit up. Gunship put out a single called "REVOLUTION.EXE" on the 21st with Tyler Bates and Dave Lombardo, who used to drum for Slayer and who I have never once expected to appear in this magazine. It's the first release on Bates's new label, Gravel And Echo Recordings. Gunship, a film composer and a thrash drummer, on a label three weeks old. I have no idea what happens next and that's the nicest thing I can say about a Friday.

The counter list

Five tracks I actually went back to, in the order I'd hand them across a counter to somebody who asked what was good.

1. DEADLIFE, "Paladin." Track five, and the one that told me the album was going to hold. It's the only place on the record where the middle fills in.
2. Makeup and Vanity Set, "Never Trust a Death Cult." Out of forty three, this is the one I replayed. Title's free.
3. Opéra De Nuit, "Karen Lloyd." The label points at this one and the label is right. Recorded somewhere between 1984 and 1988 by people who had no reason to believe anyone would hear it.
4. Oceanside85 and SelloRekt / LA Dreams, "Girl Code," with Mayah Camara. Guest vocal, credited on the page, which is the whole issue in one line.
5. Falling Islands, "PVNKTR3." Angel Tan out of Singapore, two tracks, two dollars, and a gear list that ends with "a no-brand thirty dollar mixer from Shopee, feasting on its own sonic fluids." I've heard worse mission statements from people with real studios.

Out of the house

Synthrave Live in Sheffield is still on for November 14th, at Corporation on Milton Street, one in the afternoon until half ten at night, fourteen and over. The lineup has grown from eight names to twelve since June. What it doesn't have, anywhere, on any site, is a ticket price. Not on the festival's own page, not at the venue, not on Skiddle. I looked at five places. A festival two and a half months out with no price on it is a festival still doing sums.

Same day, other side of the ocean, Darker Waves runs at Huntington Beach with Morrissey, Simple Minds, Gary Numan, Soft Cell and Adam Ant. If you were going to try to do both, I have news about the Atlantic. The LA post-punk band Deceits booked a seventeen date run that starts in Omaha on September 24th and ends on that Darker Waves stage, which is a good way to build a tour.

Two housekeeping notes. Timecop1983 and Josh Dally have been sitting in my file as a dateless rumor for weeks. Not a rumor, and not upcoming: the In The Rearview Mirror tour ran in February and March, DC through Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it's done. I was watching for a bus that had already left. And Retro Future Fest, which I've listed on the radar, now times out at both ends of its own domain, with the last capture of the site dated July 2024. No announcement. It just stopped answering.

Better news from Poland. The Wrocław Industrial Festival hits its twenty fifth year, November 5th to the 8th, with SPK, the Legendary Pink Dots and In The Nursery. Early tickets are 85 zloty for the Thursday and Sunday, 250 for the Friday and Saturday, and the four day pass has already sold out. It started in 2001 in a shelter under a hill.

And in Pe Ell, Washington, September 5th to the 7th, there's a dungeon synth camping festival called Woodland Fortress Fest and it's sold out. I could make that a joke and it doesn't deserve one. A genre that mostly exists as one person, a keyboard and a cassette run of thirty, has a campground with a sold out sign on it.

The border is the new format war

Here is the thing that happened five times this week in five different rooms.

On the 17th, BOREDOMproduct, an electronic pop label out of Marseille, stopped shipping to the European Union. Not to a country, to the union. Their own notice: "No shipment to EU until further notice," and the reason is the new packaging regulation, PPWR, whose main obligations kicked in on August 12th. They've postponed the new Foretaste album indefinitely. A French label cannot mail a record into France's neighbors.

Meanwhile the package descriptions on that DEADLIFE record carry this, in capitals: since July 1st, NewRetroWave Records will not take new physical orders from EU customers "for a while," because of EU customs reform, and any EU buyer who still wants one pays extra tax. My Pet Flamingo, in Wales, solved the same problem by routing European buyers through a separate distributor. Commodore has posted a warning about a US customs change landing on August 29th that ends the low value import exemption. And RetroTINK, shipping hardware out of Asia, went the other direction and pays everything at checkout under DDP, so nothing shows up at your door asking for money.

Last issue I told you that if a European label dropped international shipping this autumn with no explanation, it wouldn't be greed. That took eight days to come true and it came true in Marseille. The independent physical market spent twenty years solving manufacturing, and manufacturing turns out to have been the easy half. Five labels, three continents, one week, all doing paperwork instead of records.

The difference is consent and reversibility.

That's Portion Control, talking about something else entirely, and we'll get to it, but hold onto the sentence.

Pixels and polygons

Nintendo filed seven DMCA notices on August 17th and took down 403 GitHub repositories in a day. I counted that from GitHub's own DMCA archive rather than off a headline: 311 repos in the first notice, then 18, 1, 8, 22, 14 and 29. GitHub's note on the big one explains the shape of it. Because the reported network was larger than a hundred repositories, they processed the takedown "against the entire network of 311 repositories, inclusive of the parent repository." Every fork died with the parent. The grounds aren't copyright in the emulator code, they're circumvention of technical protection measures, which is a different law doing a similar job.

UrbX Warriors relaunched on the 18th and funded in less than a day. As I write this it's at £27,365 against an £18,888 goal, 144 percent, 428 backers, twenty five days left, out of Doncaster. Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge, Amiga AGA and a Mega Drive cartridge, closing September 18th.

And I owe you the answer to a number I couldn't explain last issue. I printed 914 followers, then the page said 404, I couldn't square those two, and my guess was that killing a campaign spawns a brand new page. Close, and the real mechanism is tidier. That counter only ever lived on the pre-launch page, and a pre-launch page ends the moment it turns into a live campaign. The relaunch sits at a different address entirely. So there is no follower number for this project any more, at any value, and I'm not going to print one again.

The new thing nobody's saying out loud: there's a ZX Spectrum Next edition now. Boxed, £55, and here's the part that made me laugh, it ships in March 2027 while every other tier ships in October 2027. The 8-bit version arrives seven months before the 16-bit version it's a port of. As for ownership: the Amiga tiers are ADF and WHDLoad files on a CD, so you need a real AGA machine or the wrapper they provide; the Mega Drive tiers are an actual cartridge in a box with a printed manual, in US, PAL or Japanese clamshell; and shipping is not included, it's collected at checkout later.

Somebody put Wolfenstein 3D on a stock Commodore 64. Not a demake, a raycaster, in 6502 assembly, by a developer called Kweepa, updated through the 19th. Free, and it ships as a .d64 disk image, an EasyFlash .crt, and a joystick map for THEC64, so it runs on the real machine off an SD2IEC or a flash cart rather than only in an emulator. His devlog on the 16th adds provisional mouse support and asks for "some testing on real hardware." His pitch line is "Guaranteed to make Scott Miller cry!" Miller ran Apogee. That's a shareware joke aimed at four hundred people and I'm one of them.

Star Cruiser, the 1990 Mega Drive game that basically nobody outside Japan played, got a definitive bug-fix patch on the 19th from a hacker called marinyan, and the reason it matters is who helped. Kotori Yoshimura, who programmed and designed the original and who created Thunder Force, "provided input on adjustments to ensure the game balance wouldn't be disrupted." Thirty six years later the designer is still checking your math.

It's three IPS files and you apply exactly one, never stacked: fixes only, fixes plus diagonal movement, or fixes plus diagonal plus strafe. No ROM included. The readme names the dump it wants, CRC32 2B75B52F, unmodified, so you need that specific Japanese cart image, and once patched it runs anywhere a Mega Drive ROM runs, emulator or flash cart on real hardware. Best line in the readme: the freeze fix is a presumed fix, reasoned out from the code, because they couldn't reliably reproduce the bug. That's an honest man writing documentation.

Frogbull, who has spent months decompiling the Saturn Panzer Dragoon, showed it running on a Dreamcast on the 19th. Version 0.1, first level, real hardware rather than an emulator. The catch: the build sits behind his Patreon, so the best preservation work of the week is currently a subscription.

Konami is deleting Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls on September 3rd. It was pulled from Apple Arcade on the 20th and the service terminates a fortnight later. You need an active subscription to play it today and there's no offline build, no cartridge, no disc, and nothing anybody can dump, because it always ran against a server. On the third it stops existing. Somebody in the comments offered to pay fifteen dollars for a copy that works. There isn't one to sell him.

Two follow-ups, briskly. Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns has gone from 148 reviews to 194, 130 up and 64 down, still Mixed, and the ratio slipped from about 70 percent to 67. I called it a coin standing on its edge. The coin fell, barely, the wrong way. Ten days after a Mixed launch there has been no patch at all, and the Steam news feed's most recent items are still from launch day. It did pick up a Deck rating, Playable rather than Verified, flagged for interface text you can't read. Still Windows only, still $19.99 with the 15 percent launch cut running.

And Cranford's Shadow Snare, which I promised I'd have played by now. I can't, and it's not laziness. There is no download. The site has a working build on video and a "Request Playtest Access" form, and that's the entire distribution: a mailing list. So I'll amend the promise. When there is a file, I'll play it, and I'll tell you what it costs and what it runs on. Right now the honest answer is that it's a C64 game you cannot get.

Hardware, fast. The RetroTINK-6X CE went up on the 22nd at $230, fulfilment starting the 24th, native 1440p and a quasi-4K mask mode, and Mike Chi puts the catch in his own copy: "No HDMI input. Please take note if your setup includes consoles like the GameCube or more modern systems like the PS3/Xbox360." Analog only, in through composite, S-video, SCART, VGA and component. No power adapter in the box either, you supply any USB source rated 5V and 2A, and it ships DDP with duties paid up front.

The Commodore TAC-2 finally has a ship date, October 20th, and two facts the listing hides. The Founders Edition is $64, not $49.99 like the other four colorways, because of the gold coating. And the spec sheet now says the LED is "not compatible with Amstrad, SAM Coupé, or Sega." So the glowing buttons, which are the only reason to want the fancy colors, don't glow on a Genesis. Buy the black one or the white one if that's your machine. Still a nine pin DE-9 plug, still two meters of cord, still metal contacts instead of microswitches.

On the FPGA side: the MiSTer Mac LC core is out, running System 6.0.8 through 7.5.5, reading 1.4 MB and 800K disk images plus dc42 files, though CD support handles .iso only for now because .chd and .bin/cue need a MiSTer main update that hasn't shipped. You bring your own install media. And DreamSTer, which I dropped from an issue by accident: the public build is still r6 from July 30th, but the PowerVR2 reimplementation under it took eighteen commits this week on branches named r7. The work is one repo down from where everyone's watching.

Evercade's Visco Arcade 1 and 2 both land on the 28th at £19.99 or $29.99, sixteen games across the two carts. Real cartridges, no account, nothing to download, and they run on the Alpha and on the Super Pocket handhelds as well as the older machines.

Last one, and it's a correction. I told you the Computer Space auction closed on the 21st and was sitting at $6,748. It closed on the 20th, a day earlier than I said, and it went for $24,923 with the premium against a $20,000 estimate. A working two player Nutting Associates cabinet from 1973, green sparkle fiberglass, serial 30644, out of David Perry's collection. Some outlets had been throwing around a $200,000 figure beforehand. It sold for about an eighth of that, which is what happens when the story about a thing gets valued instead of the thing.

The ingredients list, fourth time asking

I've been saying for three issues that nobody has to ban anything. Put a label on it. An ingredients list. Tell me what went into the jar and let me decide. This week I got one, from the biggest possible source, and I want to be honest about how it feels.

Apple Music is putting a "Made With AI" tag on tracks, visible to listeners, later this year. The tags have existed invisibly in the content pipeline since March. Apple's mail to its partners says content providers "will be required to include AI Transparency Tags in any instance where AI was used to create a material portion." That's the thing I asked for, in writing, from a company big enough to make it standard.

And Apple isn't checking. There's no detection. The tag comes from the label and the distributor, which means the party with the most to lose from the tag is the party applying it. Deezer runs its own detection. Spotify reviews its persona badges. Apple takes your word for it. I wanted a label on the jar and I got one written by the guy who filled the jar.

The week's other AI news is all law and money. Round Hill sued Suno and Anthropic on the 17th, separately, in Northern California, asking $150,000 per work across 500 songs each with room to expand, and named "Iris," "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" among them. What's new is the third defendant: Bright Data, a scraping company, for supplying the proxy networks and tools. Somebody finally sued the shovel salesman. Round Hill's Josh Gruss says they're "not against artificial intelligence," they're against building a billion dollar business on other people's work and paying nothing.

Then this, which I've read four times and still don't like. A UMG-backed outfit called Music IP Holdings announced a patent portfolio for AI music watermarking, twenty four granted and fifty pending, with Udio and GRAI as first licensees. So the ingredients list gets built as intellectual property instead of as an open standard everybody implements for free. Ask a printer what happens when the label machine has a rights holder.

Meanwhile Tyga put out an eighties styled album called $tarface that used AI for its period synths, said he wrote the lyrics and sang them himself, and defended the rest by saying it's "no different than when Auto-Tune came out." Pitchfork gave it a 0.0. Their critic's line was that "the margins on this thing must be amazing," which is the most useful sentence written about AI music this year.

Now the part that keeps me from being a crank about this. The label is arriving from underneath, again, and it's arriving for free. A Serbian dungeon synth project called Monasterium Imperi put "NO AI USED" in the credits of a Warhammer record that costs two dollars. Karl Casey answers it in his FAQ on every upload: "No. I make all my music myself, no AI is used in the writing or production process." itch.io now has an AI disclosure field baked into the page furniture, so a Mega Drive puzzle demo reads "AI Assisted, Text" without anybody having to argue about it.

If you prefer not to play games made with the assistance of AI, then try the 128K Spectrum, Commodore 64 or Amstrad PCW and CPC versions, as they are text only.

That's Alan Pemberton, who shipped a text adventure to nine platforms this week, everything from an Amiga build to a Sinclair QL one, and who used image generators for the pictures. He tells you, and then he hands you a version without them. Disclosure plus an alternative, from a guy working alone, in the same week a trillion dollar company announced disclosure without verification. One of those took a lawyer.

Over on the NewRetroWave subreddit somebody accused a well known artist of using AI again and the thread ran to 101 upvotes. I'm not printing the accusation. It's a Reddit post, nobody produced anything, and there's a second thread about a darksynth artist's covers where the people arguing it admit they have no confirmation and are hoping some turns up. What's worth printing is where the line sits now. The most downvoted comment in the first thread, at minus 21, was a man saying he's fine with AI music but thinks passing it off as human is scummy. He got buried for the first half of that sentence.

Here's where I land, and it's the same place, harder. Nobody is owed my trust. They're owed the chance to earn it, and the cheapest way is a line of text.

The art desk

I owe you a new artist this week and I don't have one, so here's what I did and where it fell apart. Marc Schoenbach's cover for Cemetery Echo was supposed to surface on the 21st. His site doesn't resolve any more; the domain that does is a shop selling shirts, with no artist name on it, no list of work, and no mention of the record. That's a dead end, not a story.

So instead, the ledger, because I read credits all week anyway. Named: FOGRA on the DEADLIFE cover. Version Industries on Brigador Killers. Maya Jovanovic on Strong Heart, handle printed. Christopher Padilla on the ALEX record. Aleks Kot on a Russian space synthwave debut that costs four dollars. Six Horned Goatman, who I assume is not on a passport, on a Fighting Fantasy tribute out of London.

Not named: the cover of that twenty track Aztec compilation. And the composer of a nineteen track game soundtrack that was a top three seller in five separate tag feeds this week, whose credits field is empty, so I can tell you it sold and I can't tell you who made it.

Then there's the thing I noticed on the NewRetroWave channel, which I mean gently, because they've done more for this music than I have. Their video descriptions credit the image source: "Pic Source: Nikki Cox in the 90's." "Paulina Porizkova in the 80's." "The Thing (1982)." That's a photo credit where a cover artist used to be. Nobody did anything wrong. It's just that a scene built on artwork now has a slot in its biggest shop window where the art used to go, and it's filled with someone's old headshot.

Two follow-ups. Robert Sammelin, who I wrote about a few issues back, has the slipcover on Vinegar Syndrome's Of Unknown Origin, limited to 6,000, website and indie stores only, no big retailers. And Schoenbach's Kickboxer 2 art is confirmed on Lionsgate's page for the September 15th disc, where the Dolby Vision claim I complained about last issue is now gone. It's listed as a Blu-ray with 2.0 PCM, region A, one disc, which is what it always was. I don't think I did that. I'd like to think somebody did.

Rewind culture

Last issue I noted that The Fly hit forty and nobody had announced a disc for it. A week has gone by. Still nobody. I swept every physical media announcement in the window looking for one, and what I found instead was four other labels announcing 4K restorations from original camera negatives, including an Italian cannibal picture arriving as a six disc box with a bonus score CD. Meanwhile the best copy of Cronenberg's film you can buy sits in Scream Factory's box on the transfer Fox struck for Blu-ray in 2007. The extras on it are wonderful. The picture is nineteen years old.

An American Werewolf in London hit forty five on the 21st and that one does get a 4K, October 6th, Dolby Vision and Atmos, with the Rick Baker interview. Baker won the first Academy Award for makeup ever handed out, for that film. Night of the Creeps turned forty on the 22nd with nothing attached at all: no disc, no screening, no announcement. It opened on 70 screens in 1986 and took $591,366, and Fred Dekker's female lead is named Cynthia Cronenberg, one week after The Fly's anniversary. Nobody planned that.

Terminator 2 is back in theaters from the 28th through September 2nd, wrapped around Judgment Day itself on the 29th, in 4K and RealD 3D off StudioCanal's 2017 restoration, 4DX and D-BOX in some rooms. Cameron says the 3D version is "the absolute best way to see the film," which he would. Theatrical only, no new disc, and no ticket price published anywhere I looked.

Best thing anybody launched this week: the Rewind Rolodex, from Tony Crouch of VHS IS LIFE with Lunchmeat's help, announced on the 17th. It's a free directory of people who clean and digitize tapes, plus video stores, plus artists and businesses in tape culture. Beta welcome. That's a phone book for a format everyone keeps declaring dead, and it exists because somebody got tired of watching people ask the same question in comments.

Speaking of Lunchmeat: VIDEOHEAVEN on VHS is sold out, 100 copies, no second run announced. It still doesn't say SP or EP. I asked last issue, the tapes sold out anyway, and a hundred people now own a 173 minute documentary at a recording speed nobody printed. Meanwhile the site banner says Video Town is shipping now and the Video Town product page says pre-order, projected July. I own the book. It came. The page hasn't heard.

Lionsgate is pressing new videocassettes, $29.99 each, under a line called Be Kind, Rewind Edition. On the Cabin Fever tape's page, under a product that is a videocassette, is the sentence "ARTISTIC RENDERING ONLY, INTERIOR DISC PACKAGING MAY VARY." Somebody ran the Blu-ray boilerplate over a VHS listing and shipped it. No NTSC or PAL, no SP or EP, no tape count, no pressing size. And Video Store Day's exclusive list, promised for August and due October 17th, is still not out, with eight days left in the month.

Four we lost. Frank Beard, ZZ Top's drummer, at 77, the one without the beard, who played Eliminator in 1983 and Afterburner in 1985 and put a boogie band on MTV every twenty minutes for three years. Billy Gibbons: "His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top." Rolling Stone says he died Monday, the AP says Tuesday, both citing the same family spokesman, so I'm giving you both rather than picking. Michael Wright at 70, on the 19th, who was Elias in the 1983 V miniseries before The Five Heartbeats, announced by his wife Susan. Bill Rasmussen at 93, on the 18th, who thought up a 24 hour sports channel while stuck in traffic on I-84 and launched ESPN into 1.4 million homes in September 1979. And Karin Mérat at 52, of XVII° Vie, whose death on August 1st only reached the scene this week, through a Breton community radio DJ who'd had her on his show. No cause was given for any of them and I'm not going looking.

Static

• Bandcamp Friday is September 4th, confirmed on Bandcamp's own pages, midnight to midnight Pacific, and transaction fees still apply, which they say out loud. My own damage number from the last one stays on the shelf until there's a second one to put beside it.
• Songtradr's marketplace closes September 1st, nine days out. Libraries, playlists and profiles go dark, and any balance you don't withdraw becomes unclaimed property, which is a phrase that means somebody else's.
• Portion Control signed to a label after forty years of not doing that, going to Artoffact, with a 4CD box of 1983 to 1986 out on the 14th, discs rather than a download code. On digging through their own tapes: "It's closer to handling someone else's archive that happens to have your name on it." The consent and reversibility line came from there, and it was about rebuilding old material, not about robots. It travels.
• Stabbing Westward re-recorded Wither Blister Burn + Peel in full, out September 10th, and COP International is careful to say it's "not a remaster" and "not a remix." Thirty years on, same two guys producing. I have opinions about re-recordings and I'm going to hold them until I hear it, which is a sentence I'd have skipped four issues ago.
• r/retrowave is dead. Restricted, newest post from October 2024, no activity at all this week, while the arguing has moved to a darksynth sub with 12,716 subscribers. A subreddit doesn't announce its death. It just stops, and then the good arguments turn up somewhere smaller.

The through line, if you want one, is who signs their work. Opéra De Nuit's reissue lists a mixing engineer per track for a band that never made it. A label with a catalogue number can't tell me who drew the cover. Apple will tell you a machine helped, on the machine's say-so, and a man in his spare room hands you a text only build so you can opt out of his robot. The paperwork is the art form now. It's not a great punchline but it's where the week left me.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty