You can't ask a badge about its brother | The Rewind Vol. 7

I was seven the year I got the NES, and I was seven the year a cartoon movie killed Optimus Prime in front of a room full of kids who had not been warned. My mother took me and my cousin Pete. Pete cried. I did not cry at the theater, which I want on the record, and then I cried in the car, which I would also like on the record because it's the honest version and I'm too old to be protecting a seven year old's reputation.

Peter Cullen died on Wednesday at his house in Los Angeles. He was 85. He'd been Optimus Prime since 1984, which is to say he was the voice for the entire time I've been able to form memories, and he was Eeyore too, which is a range nobody talks about enough. His family said he died surrounded by them. That's the whole statement I'm going to quote, because the rest belongs to them.

The part I can't get out of my head is the timing. The same day the obituaries went up, Shout revealed the 40th anniversary 4K steelbook of The Transformers: The Movie. The artwork on the tin is dead Optimus Prime. Nobody did that on purpose. Announcements get scheduled weeks out and the calendar doesn't check the news. But I've had a ticket to the theatrical run since the 7th, September 17th through the 21st, and I'm going to sit in a dark room in three weeks and watch that scene again with a very different weight on it.

Anyway. This is a music magazine, the week had records in it, and he'd have told me to go to work.

This week in music

The Opéra De Nuit reissue landed on the 28th and I want to correct my own emphasis from before, because I spent a whole paragraph admiring its credit list and never read the credits properly. Dan Lacksman mixed most of it. Dan Lacksman is Telex. The man who made "Moskow Diskow" was in a Brussels room with a failed French coldwave band, and that name was sitting in the small print the entire time I was congratulating everybody on their paperwork.

Dark Entries calls it "pure hellish heaven" and describes the group as "almost definitional of the coldwave genre," and points you at "the pummelling desperation of 'Annabella,' the uber-brooding vibes of 'Boris Transylvania Camp,' or the elegant anthem 'Karen Lloyd.'" 13 tracks, $15 for the digital, $30 for the gatefold double, catalogue DE-360. Still in stock as I write this, which surprised me.

Tokyo Rose put out KILLWAVE on the 28th. Five tracks, $5, no physical edition at all. His own copy says he's "blending dark synthwave, distorted electronic production, cinematic atmosphere, and heavy midtempo energy" and that the EP is "built for the after hours," which is marketing, but the track list backs it up: SHOWDOWN, VENGEANCE, KILLWAVE, DARK SKIES, BLOODSPORT. That's a man who knows exactly which shelf he's on. LEKTRIQUE mastered it. The cover is by Flaviu Pop, who signs as leaking_colour, and the name is printed where names go.

Then there's Shadowrunner's The Underneath, out on the 27th, nine tracks, $9, Los Angeles. There's no genre blurb on it at all, which I noticed only after I'd played the thing twice. In its place is a block of first person prose: "For Vida. Shoreline. I need to swim. I swim down, down. Deeper than anyone has ever fathomed. No need to draw breath. I see it. The fortress. I know that it is the after. Verdant and bioluminescent, it appears alive, breathing."

So here's my ears instead of his copy. It's slow and it's patient, long pads with the drums kept low and late, and it doesn't hand you a hook until you're several tracks deep. Track one is "Shoreline," track two is "Dive Echo," and by "Endless Doors, Endless Dreams" you are meant to be a long way under where you started, which is the one thing the prose and the record agree on. This is a drive at one in the morning, not a record for a room with people in it. Dora Pereli sings on "The Rain on My Window" and is credited by name. Cover by NinjaJo Art. The detail I liked most is buried in the small print: the vocal samples that aren't Pereli are licensed from Splice, and he says so. Nobody makes you say so.

Candy Apple Blue out of Pittsburgh released Breakthrough! on the 28th, 16 tracks for $10, and a limited CD at $20 with 42 left on the counter when I looked. I'm being careful here: there is no description on that page, none, so I'm not going to invent one for you. What I can tell you is what's in the titles, and what's in the titles is Matt Pop, over and over. "A Touch Too Much (Matt Pop Mix)." "Images of Heaven (Matt Pop Extended Mix)." "Hot as Hell (Matt Pop Remix)." The tags say hi-nrg and synth-pop. Carly Emerick did the cover for Fading Brunette Studios. Nobody is credited with mixing or mastering it, on a 16 track record that is mostly somebody else's mixes.

Two quick ones. K.A.R.R. and JJ Mist, out of Malta, have a six track EP called Runaway Heart at $9, and it does what Kurt Aquilina says it does: "ethereal sounding and groovy at times," with the guitar further forward than most people in this genre dare put it. Aquilina produces, plays, engineers and writes. Jessica Emily Eden writes the words and sings them.

Magnavolt in Sweden dropped a two tracker called AGONY for 45 kronor, sold as "a descent into tension, darkness, and raw emotion." The tracks are "Where Air Dies" and "Lost in Darkness." Michal K wrote it, produced it, mixed it, mastered it, and Navid Siyadat did the art. One man, four hats, and he still wrote down the name of the guy who drew the picture.

The one that bothered me is the smallest. Girlfriend Records put out a single by mikatwentytwo called "Sunlit" on the 28th, $1.50, and the label's own copy is lovely: "The clouds finally break," a companion piece to an earlier track called "Overcast," built on "lush synth pads, uplifting melodies, and a gentle, driving warmth." Then you scroll to the credits block and it contains a release date and a licence line. That's it. No producer, no mix, no master, no artwork. A label wrote three sentences about the weather in a song and could not spare one line for who made it.

The counter list

Five I kept going back to. Same rule as always, this is what I'd actually hand you, not what scored highest.

1. Opéra De Nuit, "Boris Transylvania Camp." The label's word is "uber-brooding" and for once the label undersold it. Recorded in Brussels by people with no reason to think anyone would ever hear it.
2. Tokyo Rose, "BLOODSPORT." Track five, and the one where the midtempo thing he's promising actually arrives instead of being described.
3. Shadowrunner, "The Rain on My Window." Dora Pereli's track as much as his. The only place on the record where a human voice is doing the work instead of the story.
4. Candy Apple Blue, "Images of Heaven (Matt Pop Extended Mix)." An extended mix of a Peter Godwin cover on a Pittsburgh synthpop record in 2026. I don't know who this is for. It's for me.
5. Magnavolt, "Where Air Dies." Two tracks and 45 kronor, and this one earns the title, which almost never happens.

Out of the house

I owe you a win. Synthrave Live in Sheffield has a ticket price. After I told you I'd checked five places and found nothing, the number is now sitting on their own event page where it should have been: £40 general admission plus a quid of service fee, and the £30 early bird has already sold out. So the festival was doing sums, and the sums are done, and the cheap tier went before the price was even findable, which tells you the people buying were not the people reading.

One flag while I'm here, because I can't help myself. Their own ticket page says the doors run 14:00 to 22:30. The press coverage says 13:00 with an 11pm curfew. Somebody's hour is wrong and it isn't mine. Buy off the official page and turn up at one if you want to be safe, and if you're standing outside for an hour, at least you'll have company.

Twelve names are up, Waveshaper and Wolfclub and New Arcades among them, with Skyracer and Ace Buchannon further down and more still to come. The bit I didn't know until this week: the whole thing grew out of an online DJ series that LeBrock's Shaun Phillips started during the pandemic, a weekly set raising money and noise for mental health. Six years from a webcam in a spare room to a 14 and over all dayer at Corporation. I'd like more origin stories to go that direction.

Bigger news, and it's not synthwave, and I don't care. Duet Emmo are playing live. Duet Emmo is Daniel Miller, who founded Mute Records and made "Warm Leatherette" as The Normal, plus Graham Lewis and B.C. Gilbert of Wire. They made one album together in 1981 and 1982 and they have never once stood on a stage as Duet Emmo. October 27th at the ICA in London, £32.71 with all the fees admitted up front, tickets went on sale on the 28th. It's part of a series where the audience sits in a ring around the performers with a 360 degree rig. Forty four years is a long time to think about a set list.

A correction on a small thing, which is the only kind of correction I'm ever going to get right. I told you Woodland Fortress Fest ran September 5th to the 7th. It's the 5th and the 6th, two nights, at Red Hawk Avalon in Pe Ell, Washington, $110 presale or $135 for the weekend with camping, 18 and over. I added a day to a dungeon synth camping trip. If you booked a third night on my say so, I hope the woods were nice.

The border is the new format war

A correction first. Last issue I told you Commodore had flagged a customs deadline for the 29th of this month, the day America's low value parcel exemption died. De minimis ended on August 29th of 2025. I was a year out, in the column I run specifically to catch that.

The date that matters now is October 22nd, when the compliance rules bite. A court upheld the suspension on the 13th, so nothing is going back. That's the whole calendar you need and I've spent enough of your morning on it.

The useful part: vinyl, CDs and cassettes are still exempt from the tariffs as informational media, confirmed by US Customs. The exemption only works if the seller writes the correct HS code on the customs form. So the thing standing between your record and a surprise bill is a small label owner doing paperwork correctly at eleven at night. Bandcamp tells sellers where to find the codes, on the packing slip under Merch Orders, and it has also shipped a feature that lets a label switch off US shipping entirely and show you an explanation instead. Read that again. A platform built a button for "we have given up on your country."

And while the border gets the attention, a station just went missing. Nightride has been the tab a lot of us leave open for years, seven channels of this music running at 320. Type the address today and you land on something called Lissen. Same shell, different name, no farewell post, no changelog, no dated announcement anywhere I can find in four weeks of looking, and nobody's name on any of it. I'm not alleging anything. A radio station is allowed to rebrand. But this magazine has spent two months on who signs their work, and the cleanest disappearance of the year happened to a station that has been open in a tab on my desk for longer than this magazine has existed.

The delay is down to the audio quality of the original vinyl cut not being quite up to scratch which meant the vinyl required a re-cut.

That's the Erasure Information Service explaining why Andy Bell's Extended Blue triple vinyl missed its date, along with a 12 inch that moved from the 14th to the 28th and then missed the 28th too. No new date. Even when the border behaves, the lathe might not. Meanwhile BOREDOMproduct in Marseille still isn't shipping to the EU under the packaging rules, hasn't reversed it, and nobody else in this scene has joined them.

Pixels and polygons

Best thing in this section is 37 years late. Return to Blacktooth came out for the Atari Jaguar on the 27th. It's a sequel to Head Over Heels, Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's 1987 game, and it has over 300 rooms. Colin Porch designed and programmed it, and he's the man who did the original's Amiga, ST and C64 conversions. He started this sequel in 1989 at Ocean Software and shelved it when the industry pivoted to consoles. Amiga and ST versions came out in May; the Jaguar one is now. Reboot Games did the Jaguar port and Jochen Feldkoetter wrote the music, and I nearly printed this paragraph without either name, in an issue about exactly that.

What you actually get is a .ROM file. It runs in BigPEmu, or on a real Jaguar through a GameDrive or a SkunkBoard flash cart. No original cartridge required, nothing to dump. The itch page takes $9.74 as a minimum and a physical release is planned but not dated. A man finished his homework 37 years late and the file he hands you works on the actual machine.

Against that, Konami switches off Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls on September 3rd. I flagged this before and now it's four days out. It only ever existed on Apple Arcade, so there is no offline build, no cartridge, no disc, no refund, and no statement about whether it will ever exist again. It requires an active subscription and it always ran against a server, so it works on nothing you own, and when the subscription stops pointing at it, it stops. I've spent this whole issue on people writing their names on things. Nobody has to sign a deletion.

CAVE released DoDonPachi Resurrection Reignite on the 26th and it went badly. $12.49, cut to $11.24 until September 5th, and 133 reviews in as I write this it sits at 40% positive, which is Mixed by a single point off Mostly Negative. Windows 11, no Steam Deck rating at all. The complaints are that the arranges and the black label are missing and that there's no training mode, which for a bullet hell port is like a driving game without a handbrake. People do like Shmup Royale, the new multiplayer mode. On the store page CAVE says outright that "AI is used in part for translating text from Japanese into the supported languages," declared and scoped to the subtitles. The 2016 port of the same game is still on sale next to it and is still better regarded.

Two old Macintosh games turned up on Steam on the 18th, Dark Castle from 1986 and Beyond Dark Castle from 1987, and I had them wrong in my notes, so let me get them right in print: these are not the original binaries running under something. They're replicas, rebuilt to preserve the 1-bit art, the animation, the timing and the difficulty. $6.29 each right now. They run natively on Windows, macOS and Linux, no emulator and no original disk, which is a rarer posture than it sounds. The studio was founded by Mark Stephen Pierce, who co-created the originals. Between them they have eight user reviews, which is not enough for Steam to show a score, while the 2008 Return to Dark Castle sitting beside them has 78 reviews at 94%.

The romhack of the week is Star Cruiser on Mega Drive, by marinyan, and the README is a model of the form. The ROM is not included. Your target dump has to check out at CRC32 2B75B52F. There are three .ips files, 161, 175 and 325 bytes, and you apply exactly one of them to an unmodified ROM and never stack them. The biggest one adds diagonal strafing at 75% of normal strafe speed and caps the turn rate at 3, and the reason those numbers exist is that Kotori Yoshimura, who designed and programmed the 1990 Mega Drive game, gave input on keeping the balance intact. Best line in the whole document: the fix for the freeze after the first mock battle is described as an estimated fix, worked out from static analysis, because he couldn't reliably reproduce the bug. Shipping a patch and admitting in writing that you never reproduced the bug you fixed. More of that, please.

Evercade put out Visco Arcade 1 and 2 on the 28th at £19.99, $29.99 or €24.99 each, eight games per cartridge, sixteen across the pair, with printed manuals. They're licensed physical cartridges, so there's no ROM to find and nothing to flash, and each one works on the Evercade consoles and the Super Pocket handhelds. Check your firmware is current before you blame the cart. Andro Dunos and Ganryu are on there. It's been two days and nobody has reviewed them yet, so I'm not going to pretend to know how they feel.

THEA1200 became an official Amiga product at Gamescom on the 28th, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2026, and it ships on December 4th after a six month slip. Retro Games' CTO Chris Smith says the hardware is done and the operating system is the holdup: "We could ship with a more basic OS, but that wouldn't do justice to THEA1200." Chip shortages and plastic costs got blamed too. I'm not reprinting the price, because nobody restated it this week and I've already been a year wrong about a number once today.

The RetroTINK-6X CE started shipping on the 24th at $230. It plugs into analog sources only: VGA, SCART, component, S-Video, composite, and there's no HDMI input at all. Output is native 1440p over HDMI with an HDR10 signal, which is a trick for pulling better black levels out of a modern panel rather than anything a Mega Drive ever mastered. Two cautions before you spend. If your console is HDMI only, a Wii U or a PS4, this box has no socket for you. And check your television actually takes 1440p60, because plenty of monitors do and plenty of televisions don't.

Nintendo's DMCA sweep from the 17th is still standing: 401 repositories gone in a day, 311 of them the Suyu network, meaning one project and its forks. Nothing restored, no counter notices filed. GitHub says it contacted owners first and gave them a chance to change the code, which is more process than the headline suggests and still ends with 401 gone.

And DreamSTer, the Dreamcast core for MiSTer that everybody's watching, is still on r6 from July 30th, with the repository quiet since August 20th. Ten days of nothing is not a crisis and I'm not going to dress it as one. I'm saying it out loud because silence and momentum look identical from outside.

Michael Cranford's Shadow Snare, the 43 years late C64 sequel I promised to play, still has no file. There's a gameplay video on the site, and a link that asks you to apply for playtest access, and nothing else on offer. There's also a wrinkle I have to report because I'd report it about anyone else: Time Extension flagged visibly generative AI in the game's art. I keep my promise the same way I made it. The day a file exists, I play it, and you get the price, the machine it needs and an honest word about that artwork.

The ingredients list, fifth time asking

Spotify's version arrives in the middle of September and it has teeth the others don't. They're putting an AI persona badge on profiles, artists can declare themselves, and Spotify will also apply a "Likely AI Persona" label off its own review, with an appeal. Here's the part that matters more than the badge: a labelled account's music stays up, but it comes out of editorial and algorithmic recommendation by default unless you already follow that artist. Calling that a label undersells it. They are moving the record to a shelf in the back of the shop.

Apple's tag, which I wrote about last issue, still runs on what the label declares. Deezer is the one with numbers, and the numbers are absurd: over 13.4 million AI tracks tagged across last year, and the rate has climbed since to roughly 75,000 a day, about 44% of everything uploaded. They've also put a detector out free to the public. So we now have three streaming services with three different theories of the same problem, and only Deezer hands the listener a filter of their own.

The lawsuits got a calendar. Round Hill's cases against Suno and Anthropic, filed on the 17th, now have a joint statement due November 11th and a first conference on the 18th. Each complaint attaches 500 compositions as a sample and Round Hill says it'll amend up toward ten thousand or more, at up to $150,000 a work, and that it isn't looking to settle. Bright Data is still in there as the scraper.

Then the other direction. Music IP Holdings, backed by Universal, is sitting on 24 granted patents with about 50 more pending covering prompt entry, moderation, watermarking, tagging and licensed distribution, and the first two licensees are Udio, the AI song generator, and a smaller outfit called GRAI. Their stated preference is licensing rather than suing. I've asked five times now for an ingredients list. I did not think about who would own the printing press for the labels.

Down at our end it's smaller and stranger. A Dutch project called Tony Stallone put out a five track record on the 28th that tags itself "ai" in its own keywords, has no description, and has an entirely empty credits field. I'm not going to be rude about it. It's the most honest page of the three I've described today, because it tells you what it is and doesn't tell you a story about clouds. Meanwhile Red Hex in Romania is up to 16 albums with the credits block empty on every one and no artist description at all, and a project called Lino Fetussi put out seven albums in three days this week. I have no claim about how any of it was made. I have a claim about what a page with nobody's name on it is worth, and it's the same claim I made in July.

The art desk

In the first issue I promised this desk would open the day I could point at a real artist. Since then I've filled the space with excuses, with credit ledgers, with lists of people who did get named, and once with a straight apology. Today there's a person in it.

Richey Beckett works in pen and ink out of rural Wales in the engraving tradition, and this week Arrow announced Clash of the Titans on 4K for November 17th with newly commissioned artwork by him: a reversible sleeve and a double sided foldout poster, credited by name on Arrow's own product page. $45 against a $59.99 list, two discs, Dolby Vision with HDR10 compatibility, the restored original stereo plus a new Atmos mix. He's done official work for Labyrinth, Army of Darkness, The Wicker Man and It Follows, and for Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Black Sabbath and Queens of the Stone Age. His site is richeybeckett.com and his Instagram is open with about 149,000 people on it.

He is not a synthwave artist and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make my own column tidier. He's a line engraver who ended up on a Harryhausen disc. But the standard I set for this desk was a real named human with a public account and a specific dated piece I could point at, and after six issues of not clearing my own bar, I'm not moving it now that somebody has.

Two housekeeping notes attached. I went back at Marc Schoenbach, the designer behind Sadist Art Designs who draws a lot of the boutique horror disc covers you own, and who I left last time as a dead portfolio and a shop I couldn't square. The shop is the answer. It's shirts and posters, including a signed They Live giclee at $95, and the reason there's no portfolio behind it is that he doesn't keep one, he keeps a till. The work is real and it's dated: his Kickboxer 2 cover lands on the 15th, as number 41 in Lionsgate's Vestron Video reissue line. While I'm handing out names, this week's records were drawn by Flaviu Pop, NinjaJo Art, Navid Siyadat, and Carly Emerick for Fading Brunette Studios. That took me four minutes to assemble and it's four minutes more than some labels can find.

Rewind culture

Three deaths this week and I'm not printing a cause for any of them, same as always. Dolly Parton died on the 25th in Nashville at 80. She isn't this magazine's beat and she's on this page anyway, because 9 to 5 came out in 1980 and she wrote and sang the title song and it went to number one, and there is a specific kind of American who learned what a workday was from that movie before they ever had one.

Tim Curry died at 80 at his house in Toluca Lake. The date is genuinely unsettled: TMZ has him dying late on the 25th, NPR's obituary is dated the 26th, and I'm not going to pick a day to make my sentence cleaner. Rocky Horror is what the headlines lead with, and fine, but he was Wadsworth in Clue in 1985 and Darkness in Legend the same year, under an hour of prosthetics, and then Pennywise in 1990 in front of a generation who did not recover. He had a severe stroke in 2012 and kept working with his voice.

Which brings it back around. Peter Cullen built Optimus Prime out of his own brother. He's told this story for decades and it's still the best thing anybody said about him this week, so it can close the section:

It was his tone of voice and delivery as a leader, his control that impressed me, and I applied my brother's attitude to life to Optimus Prime.

His brother Larry was a Marine. The most recognizable heroic voice in American childhood was a man doing an impression of somebody he looked up to, and he said so every time he was asked, which is the whole job of a credit.

The steelbook is $49.99, two discs, November 17th, and yes I'll buy it. The theatrical run is the 17th through the 21st of September with a brand new post credits scene, the first time that film has been added to since 1986. Hasbro is calling the campaign The Apology Tour, an apology for killing him off in 1986. That was funny when I bought the ticket on the 7th.

Static

• Video Store Day finally published its list and I'm glad I kept asking. Twelve exclusives for October 17th: six of them on VHS, seven of them from the 80s. Grindhouse doing Cannibal Holocaust on tape, Troma doing The Toxic Avenger, MVD doing Joysticks and The House on Sorority Row, Severin doing Unhinged, Full Moon doing Parasite. Exactly one title tells you how many exist, and that's Parasite at 1,000 copies. Not one of the twelve has a price on it, and no VHS title says NTSC or PAL or SP or EP. We are 48 days out.
• Lunchmeat's Video Town is still in two states at once, second month running. The banner on the front page says VIDEO TOWN SHIPPING NOW. The product page, which I pulled today, still opens with "NOTE: THIS IS A PRE-ORDER. BOOKS PROJECTED TO SHIP IN JULY 2026." It's $19.99, it's a novel by Robert Freese about a video store owner fighting a chain over a two day rental contest, and it climaxes on Halloween night 1987. It also pitches itself to readers who like Joysticks, which turns up on the Video Store Day list the same week. My copy has been on the shelf since before I first wrote about this. The website still hasn't been told.
• The Rewind Rolodex, the free directory of tape repair and digitizing people that VHS IS LIFE launched with Lunchmeat's help this month, has numbers now. Thirteen days after launch: 156 listings, 186 users, six countries. Broken out, that's 69 repair and digitizing services, 60 community entries, 6 resources, and 21 physical stores. Twenty one video stores on a worldwide directory. I keep looking at that number and deciding it's the good news, because two weeks ago it was zero and somebody had to type the first one.
• Stabbing Westward's Wither ReWired, a full re-recording of their 1996 album, is on preorder for September 10th, 11 tracks, $12 digital, $29.99 for the 180 gram black vinyl with 370 left. Their line is that it's "a ground-up reinterpretation" and that "the original remains untouched and essential," which is the correct thing to say and costs nothing to say. Chris Hall and Walter Flakus split the production down the track list. "Crushing Me" is out now if you preorder.
• Nine 80s titles were announced by boutique labels this week and not one was sold as an anniversary. Severin alone did four, including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Bloody Moon on 4K, and posted none of them to its own newsroom, which has been dark since May 29th. Kino is doing Peter Hyams' Running Scared on 4K with no date and no specs. The labels have stopped running the anniversary playbook entirely, and after two months of me counting unmarked birthdays, I've decided I prefer it.

I've been writing this magazine about names on things for two months and I thought I understood why it mattered. Credits, I said. Paperwork. Who signs the work. Then a voice actor died on Wednesday and I found out what I'd actually been circling, which is that a name on a thing is a promise that a person was there and can be asked about it. You can license a patent for tagging a machine. You can put a badge on a profile. You cannot ask a badge about its brother.

Konami turns off a Castlevania on Thursday and nobody has to sign that. The other direction is quieter and it was all over this week if you looked: an engraver in Wales put his name on a Medusa, a designer in Japan sat with somebody rebalancing the game they built 36 years ago and said how far to take it. And a man in California spent 42 years doing an impression of his brother, in public, and said whose voice it was every single time he was asked.

Go buy something with a name on it this week. Bandcamp Friday is the 4th.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty