Mid-September became this fall | The Rewind Vol. 9

Dana sent me a voice memo on Wednesday night. Nine seconds, recorded somewhere with fluorescent lights by the sound of it, a cart wheel squeaking across the front, and under that a song coming out of the ceiling speakers. Gated drums, a bright synth hook, a voice too far away to make out. Her text underneath: "is this one of yours or one of the robot ones."

I played it about twenty times. Shazam gave up on the second try. I've been buying this music since Drive in 2011, Dana has the good speakers and I've got the opinions, and I couldn't tell her. What I could tell her by Friday is that the robot ones had a busy week with the record business, and the one company that promised to label them pushed its date back. We'll get there. Records first.

This week in music

My favourite record this week came out of Portland on Saturday, on cassette, and it tells you what's in it down to the drum machines. Velocity 128, Betamax Video Club Vol. 2. The duo's own page lists the gear, which beats any adjective a band could hand a stranger: Prophet 6, Oberheim Matrix 1000, DeepMind 12, a Juno-106 and a JX-8P, with Roland TR-8S, TR-08 and TR-09 on drums. They say it grew out of their live sets at a night called Betamax Video Club in Washington, D.C., and that it's built for "dusty desert highways to arcade bars, oceanside drives, and neon-lit hotels." Ten tracks, name your price digital, $9 for the tape. Written and recorded by Eric Garwood and Jonathan Lim, produced and mixed by Lim, mastered by Scott Radke at Sonic Impact.

Then the line I'd frame and hang in the attic: "For fans raised on Buck Rogers, Voltron, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Betamax-era science fiction, arcade games, and questionable 80s B-movies." Read the tracklist after that and it turns into a quiz. "Kobol" is the lost home planet from Battlestar. "Codename Allura" is the Voltron princess. "Hard Ticket" is, I'm going to assume, Andy Sidaris, and if it isn't, it should be. The cassette insert credits the album art to the band and the photos to Van Ngo, shot at L'Enfant Plaza in D.C. And they're playing two Pacific Northwest dates next weekend, which I'll get to below.

Jessy Mach, who turned up on two tracks of Lyst's Operator, put out five tracks of their own on Thursday, Dangerous Woman, with liner notes written like a TV movie treatment. Sandy Seavers is a stuntwoman with a red Testarossa on Malibu Canyon Road. "Pacific Night" is, in the page's words, "a floating ballad with a guitar that cries softly," and the closer "Sunset Stunt" is "a funky electro groove building into a final shred." All of it composed, played, mixed and mastered by Frédéric Faupin at a studio called Dafuzz. The credit I like best is the one for the other camp: the title track also comes as a bonus version "with no guitar, just pure studio synths," for the purists. $3. Somebody who shreds for a living made a guitar free copy for the people who complain about guitars.

The biggest scene name with something new is Scandroid, and a credit sheet that made me laugh out loud. "Jericho" landed on Wednesday on FiXT, the second preview from the coming album Lost Horizon, and Side-Line files it as Scandroid covering Celldweller. Scandroid is Klayton. Celldweller is also Klayton. So the title reads "Jericho (feat. Celldweller)," and the credits read written by Klayton, produced by Klayton, published by Celldweller Music. One artist covering themselves, featuring themselves. The page gives no description at all, only the tags Electronic and Los Angeles, so what it sounds like is your job this week, not mine. Mixed by Joel Wanasek, mastered by Maor Appelbaum, cover by Cory Todd, one dollar. The first Scandroid record got me through a winter of overnight shifts at the classic rock station I used to work, so I'll hear this one out of loyalty.

Michael Oakley came into my week through a side door. NewRetroWave premiered a video on Thursday for "Warriors of the Wasteland," and when I went to buy the record I found it's been out since May 29th, seven weeks before this magazine existed. Prologue, ten tracks, Oakley's first project in five years by the label's count. The label copy promises "cutting edge sonics," which tells me nothing, but the tags do some work: dreamwave, synthpop, 90s dance and, of all things, trance.

The physical side is where I lost twenty minutes. Red or blue 180 gram vinyl, 100 of each, $25.29. Red or blue cassettes, 50 of each, $12.99. A pressed CD digipak at $14.99. And a MiniDisc, red or blue, from $12.99, with the page shouting "THIS IS A MINI DISC, NOT A CD" and adding that Sony isn't making blanks anymore. Before you buy that one: you need a MiniDisc deck, and I'd bet money you sold yours around 2004. I sold two of them at Circuit City, where I worked after the video store closed, and I remember explaining to both customers that it would take over the world.

Friday was September 11th, and one label picked that date on purpose. My Pet Flamingo reissued 猫 シ Corp.'s News At 11 for its tenth anniversary, and 40 percent of the proceeds go to 9/11 charities. It's a vaporwave record, tagged ambient, future funk and experimental, laid out as a morning of American television, with track titles like "Goodmorning America!", "Morning Commute" and "8:46 AM." The label calls it "a hauntingly beautiful album that wills the listener to imagine a time before everything changed." The credits say the eleven Weather Channel interludes were "taken from a lost and found VHS." Somebody taped the Weather Channel, lost the tape, and a stranger turned it into a record.

I was 22 and working the Vault that Tuesday. We opened at ten like always. Nobody rented anything all day, and around noon we switched the display TVs off the trailer loop and onto the news and left them there until close. That's as much as I'm going to say about it. Cassette £11.99 shipping the 23rd, double vinyl £32.99 in November, all three box sets already gone, name your price digital.

A small one, because the about text got me. Bit Pixel, The Boy in the Box Room, out last Monday, the 7th, is Andy Condon writing a letter to the teenager he used to be, who "spent hours dreaming about synthesizers, records and impossible futures" in a box room. Tagged synthpop, bedroom pop and electro. Ten tracks, £7 digital, £10 for the CD. The note ends: "He was right." I've read a lot of about texts this summer and that's the one I'd print on the back of the sleeve.

Dan J. Schulte put out Mach 1989 today from Palm Springs, and the about text is a statement of intent I'd sign: the MACH 80's project is "a series of 'soundtrack' concept albums that embody the sound of 80's Neo-noir," the film and TV electronic music that "greatly inspired me from 1985-1989." Tagged ambient, soundtrack and synthwave. Nine tracks, $7, titles like "One Last Score," "Rooftop Break-In" and "Tangerine Twilight," and I'm choosing to believe that last one is a nod. To Live and Die in L.A. is 1985, dead in that window, and Thief misses it by four years, which I'll forgive. No credits on the page.

SATORI IN BED went the other direction on MOTEL, out today, sixteen tracks set in a place called SynthCity during a heat wave in the summer of 1986. Written, produced and performed by Damien Faity Rougier, with David Gomez singing on two tracks, a guitar solo by Max C. and a saxophone solo by Matias Pecorale on "Restless Hearts." Then there's the sentence I'm going to have to sit with: "All music is composed and recorded in 432 Hz." I've got nothing against it. I've also never met anyone who could hear it. €8.90, digital only.

Omega Ronin put out High Definition Graphics on Friday, eleven tracks with titles that do the arguing for them: "Sexing the 16-Bit Orbital Battle Squadron," "Galactic Dirigible in Quadrant Fear," "Microcomputer Malfunction 1989." Tagged synthwave and darksynth. $11 digital, $40 for 180 gram black vinyl shipping December 11th, and a free listening party you can RSVP to. Beyond that, the page has nothing. No description, no credits, no mixing or mastering name, no cover artist. It's a forty dollar record, and the only name on the page is the band's.

Stock report on the September 4th pile, since two of them moved fast. Lyst's $40 electric blue lathe cut of Operator is sold out. Stabbing Westward's cassette, 150 copies with 30 left a week ago, is gone, and the 180 gram vinyl dropped from 350 to 268 in seven days. That's 82 records in a week for a reissue. Rosetta Stone's Executing Nostalgia still reads 5 remaining on vinyl, cassette and CD, exactly what it read last Sunday, and I can't tell you what that means. Telex finally priced MAXI: $39.98 for the red and blue double vinyl, $14.98 for the CD, both still dated December 4th, while the Bandcamp page now puts the album itself at February 26th, 2027. So the object arrives in December and the stream arrives in February, which fits Mute's line about digital coming in 2027, just with a day on it.

One for the calendar instead of the cart. Johan Agebjörn's Casablanca Nights 2 is on pre-order for October 30th, and the guest list reads like the back of every Italo-leaning synthpop record I own: Little Boots, Fred Ventura, NINA, Tom Hooker, Ryan Paris with Sally Shapiro, Bunny X, and Dana Jean Phoenix twice. "Waiting For Magic" has a saxophone solo by Steve Moore, and its writing credit goes to Jonas Berggren and Ulf Ekberg, the Ace of Base songwriters. Blue vinyl €24 with 67 left, and the vinyl is 10 tracks against 12 digital, which the page tells you up front. At the bottom there's a plan for volume three in the 2030s, four in the 2040s and a fifth in the 2050s, "before I retire." A thirty year release schedule. I'll be 77 for the last one, and I'll pre-order it.

The counter list

Five I kept reaching for this week, sleeve notes included.

Velocity 128, "Codename Allura." They put Voltron in their fan list and then named a track after the princess. I had the lions. My sister Carol had the lions too, and hers still had all their heads.

Jessy Mach, "Pacific Night." The ballad in the stuntwoman story. Faupin's own description is better than anything I'd write, so read it and then press play.

Michael Oakley, "Warriors of the Wasteland." Three minutes fifty five, the one with the video, off a record that came out before I had this job.

Bit Pixel, "Tell It To The Bees." Track seven. The title earned the click on its own.

猫 シ Corp., "8:46 AM." No joke here. It's why the reissue came out on the 11th.

Out of the house

Nightride FM, the synthwave internet radio station a lot of us leave running all day, still hasn't posted a word telling anybody it moved to lissen.to. But the new platform has a public events calendar, a plain list, and it turns out to be more useful than half the listing sites I checked this month. So here's what's on it that you can actually go to.

Velocity 128, from the top of this issue, play PNWC Presents SYNTH in Seattle on Friday the 18th with Odditee, Dream Commander and Future Flux 84, then SYNTH in Transit in Portland on Saturday the 19th, with Daniel Quasar added to the bill. A band puts a tape out on a Saturday and plays it in two cities the next weekend. That's how this used to work, and I'm glad somebody still does it.

The Midnight's Time Machines tour is listed from September 9th through October 19th, North America, multiple venues. I'm the guy who defends the saxophone at parties, and I'll be doing it from Ohio this time. Further down the same calendar there's Nightride's own TSOS show with Jessie Frye, which the list puts at 01:00 UTC on September 26th, so the evening of the 25th for most of America, and Arcade High on November 3rd.

Synthrave Live in Sheffield, November 14th, is on there too, and nothing about it changed this week. Still twelve acts, general admission still £40 plus a pound, and the promoter's ticket page and the venue's page still disagree by an hour about when the doors open. Over at the ICA, the TG50 page no longer names a room for the Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti talk, just 6pm.

Pixels and polygons

A Sega Model 1 core showed up for MiSTer this week (MiSTer being the open FPGA box that rebuilds old consoles and arcade boards in circuitry rather than emulating them), and its README is refreshingly blunt about what doesn't work. Model 1 is the 1992 board behind Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, flat shaded polygons with no textures, and nobody had claimed it on MiSTer. The developer, alphanu1, has real Virtua Racing code running on a DE10-Nano. The top of the repository still says "Only Virtua Racing is released," but the release folder, the part you actually download, ships two MRAs: Virtua Racing and Virtua Formula, the linked cabinet F1 version that MAME treats as a clone of it. And in capitals: "THERE IS NO SOUND. None at all." The sound hardware is a separate board with its own 68000, and that work hasn't started.

Here's where people get burned, straight off the release notes: "You need TWO zips, not one." That's vr.zip, plus the I/O board's Z80 firmware from a separate BIOS set, model1io.zip or daytona93.zip, and without it "the game does not boot." Virtua Formula adds vformula.zip, and if yours is a split set it still leans on vr.zip. The notes also ask for a 128 MB SDRAM module, want the core renamed to Model1.rbf, and warn that a spare Model1_something.rbf left in the cores folder will load instead of the one you meant, without telling you. Time Extension says it runs at 99 percent of the original hardware's speed. So it's two silent racing games on real FPGA hardware, with your own zips. I put a stupid number of quarters into a Virtua Racing cabinet at thirteen and I'm going to play it with no sound like a lunatic, because the polygons were the whole point.

Two more arcade boards came with it. RetroRGB lists rossops' Sega Y Board core as playing Power Drift, Galaxy Force II, both versions of G-LOC, Rail Chase and Strike Fighter. I couldn't get a ROM line out of that project's page, so check its README before you go hunting. Atari's Hard Drivin' arrived from retrogarage in its cockpit revision 7 form, with a setup sentence nobody can misread: "Place the unmodified MAME harddriv.zip ROM set in a MiSTer arcade ROM search directory. Game ROM archives are not included." Runs on stock MiSTer Main, and the README is upfront about the one thing a cockpit owner will miss: "Cabinet force feedback is not provided."

DoDonPachi Resurrection Reignite, a week after CAVE's apology. Patch 1.0.3 went out Monday with a fix for Golden Disaster attacks that weren't firing and a freely resizable window, plus CAVE's own warning that making the window "wider on the X-axis than the Y-axis may result in a horizontally stretched display." The roadmap Kotani's letter promised hasn't been posted. Reviews went from 161 to 168, now 77 up and 91 down, 45.8 percent, still Mixed, still $24.99. One real change: last issue I wrote that Steam Deck wasn't rated. Steam's compatibility report now says Verified, all four checks passed. Still Windows only, and there's still no TATE rotation mode mentioned anywhere in the store text or the patch notes, which is the first thing any shmup player looks for.

UrbX Warriors closes on Thursday. Kickstarter's own numbers today say 716 backers and £46,901 against the £18,888 goal, 248 percent, up from 647 backers and £41,250 a week ago. 69 more people in seven days. It's a Mega Drive and Amiga AGA game on physical media, one manufacturing run, and Thursday is when that run stops taking names.

Now the one that got me doing sums again. My Amiga 500 drowned in the 1998 flood, and back in August I admitted in print to pricing out a used A1200. At the end of August I told you THEA1200, the full size A1200 revival, ships December 4th, and I didn't print a price because nobody had restated one. Plaion's European store has one now: €189.99, pre-order, "release and shipping starting December 4, 2026." That's the same Friday as Telex's MAXI, if you're keeping a list of December 4th damage. Plaion's US store doesn't list it at all, only Neo Geo AES+ gear, so I still don't have a dollar figure. What you plug in and what you bring is the good part. HDMI out "supporting both 50Hz PAL and 60Hz NTSC display modes," four USB-A ports, and "Load your own legally owned Amiga software directly from USB, including comprehensive support for WHDLoad installations, floppy disk, hard drive and CD-ROM images." In the box there's a USB-C power cable and, in the listing's own capitals, "AC Adapter NOT included," so budget a plug. It runs images of disks, not disks, and I'd keep the basement out of it this time.

The Star Fox EX split kept going without one of its authors. After Sunlit cut ties with KandoWontu over AI use, KandoWontu shipped six more builds of Star Fox Enhanced between Monday and Wednesday, up to v0.0.6.5, with Android and Switch fixes in the commit log. What you need, verbatim from the README: "This is an alpha release, not a cycle-accurate SNES emulator. A supported, unmodified retail ROM supplied by you is required. No retail ROM is included." And the last line of its credits section, which matters in this particular story: "Development uses Codex." Near the top it calls itself a native port of UltraStarFox, and that link points at Sunlit's repository. So the work Sunlit walked away from is shipping twice a day, with Sunlit's project named in its first lines.

DreamSTer, the Dreamcast project that takes over a MiSTer board rather than running as a normal core, still has r6 from July 30th as its public build, and its own repository took no commits this week. The graphics work that got merged on September 6th hasn't turned into a release yet. If you're setting it up anyway, the README's instruction hasn't changed: "Put the correct BIOS and flash files in games/Dreamcast on the SD/microSD card."

Michael Cranford's Shadow Snare site is still a playtest sign-up form, no file, no price. When there's something to download, you'll hear it here first.

The ingredients list

Spotify's AI badge was due in mid-September. I printed that last issue because it was Spotify's own date. It's mid-September now, and the artist support page has been rewritten: badges appear "as badges roll out starting this fall." Fall runs to December 21st. The rest reads the way it did. "AI persona" if the artist says so, "Likely AI Persona" if Spotify decides it, and badged artists stay out of editorial and personalized recommendations unless a listener goes looking.

Meanwhile the thing the badge is supposed to label shipped a new version with its partners standing next to it. Suno launched v6 on Wednesday with Warner Music, BMG and Believe as what it calls industry partners, and retired its older models the same day. None of that paper is new: Suno settled Warner's lawsuit and signed with it back in November 2025, and added BMG since, but Believe only signed on Tuesday. v6 is the licensed model Suno has been promising since that Warner settlement. Its chief product officer, Jack Brody, explained the new training set to Music Business Worldwide, and I'll let him have the box. The same article reports Suno's September 1st answer in the Universal and Sony case, which admits "audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP," while arguing the labels don't have standing. Fact discovery closes September 30th.

Obviously, getting to v6 and training this on a new set of data that, for example, doesn't include data from Universal or Sony is part of getting our partners and the industry more comfortable with what we're doing.

The next day Universal, one of the two companies not in that data, signed with somebody else again. UMG and ElevenLabs announced a global deal on Thursday for a fan platform that will "give fans new ways to co-create with music from participating artists and songwriters," meaning remixes, mashups and "personalized vocal experiences." MBW ran the valuation next to it: ElevenLabs at $11 billion, more than double Suno's $5.4 billion. Universal already had Udio, having settled that lawsuit and struck a licensing deal last October, so this is its second AI partner, and ElevenLabs' first major. Universal is also still suing Suno, right alongside Sony.

The players' union is in this too. The American Federation of Musicians filed against Universal's and Warner's motions to dismiss its case on September 4th, and MBW reported it Thursday under a headline saying members' recordings "were fed into AI systems for commercial exploitation." It's the one filing of the week that's about the people who actually played on the records.

So where did I find a real ingredients list this week? At the bottom of a darksynth record from somebody with no label at all. THE CRUCIFIX put out Hero on Friday, tagged darksynth, dark ambient, EBM, industrial and noise rock, five dollars. The credits say Yaroslav Zavgorodniy wrote it, performed it, produced it, mixed and mastered it, drew the artwork, and then the last two words on the page: "No AI." That's the entire label, typed by the one person who'd know. Companies worth billions spent the week negotiating what goes in the jar, and a five dollar record told you in two words.

The art desk

No new artist for the desk again, and I'm not lowering the bar to fill the chair. What I've got instead is the fullest artwork credit I can remember seeing on a Bandcamp page, and it's on a $1.50 single.

BMX Escape and Midsummer Ex, "Some Magic," out Friday from Rouen. The page calls it "punchy, radio-friendly synthpop" with "a wild, groovy bassline, energetic drums and catchy synth hooks." Songwriting and lead vocals by Kjell Gustav Johan Collander, synths and production by Benoit Gaultier. Then the art credit, all of it: "Artwork by Benoit Gaultier for VHS Heaven. Created with Blender, GIMP and Inkscape. 'Magic Book Set' 3D model by evildeer, licensed under CC BY 4.0." They credited the software. They credited a stranger's 3D model by username and named the license it's used under. I've spent two months asking an industry for an ingredients list, and a synthpop single wrote one for a book prop.

The other item is a follow-up I've carried since August. Kickboxer 2 hits stores Tuesday as number 41 in Lionsgate's Vestron Collector's Series, and the label's own product page credits "collectible artwork by Marc Schoenbach," which is the whole reason that name keeps turning up in this column. Ownership, since that's where this story started: the label's page sells one thing, a Blu-ray at $24.99, and says nothing about Dolby Vision or 4K anywhere. The press release that ran in August still prints "Discs: 2 Blu-ray" one line above "Dolby Vision," and a 1080p disc can't carry Dolby Vision. The label page is right and the release is wrong, and neither one gives a region code.

And Video Store Day is five weeks out, twelve exclusive releases, and still hasn't printed a price or a cover artist for any of them.

Rewind culture

This week's correction is mine, and it's about credit, in a column that has spent a month lecturing people about credit. Last issue I wrote that no director, no studio and no writer was credited for Optimus Prime: Awakening "anywhere I looked," and I asked who drew it. Anime News Network had all of it on September 1st, five days before I typed that: directed by Josh Wassung, written by Ryan Parrott, animated by The Third Floor, music by Bobby Krlic. Parrott confirmed writing it, on the record, the same day. I didn't look far enough, and I wrote "anywhere I looked" as though that covered me.

The composer is the name I'd have led with. Bobby Krlic records as The Haxan Cloak and scored Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid and Beef under his own name. The guy who made a Swedish midsummer festival the most frightening place in cinema wrote the music under Peter Cullen's last scene as Optimus Prime. I have no idea what that sounds like. I'll know Thursday.

Hasbro put out a 30 second preview on Thursday, and the note that came with it, about Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime since 1984, says: "In light of Peter's passing, we are especially honored to share this performance with the Transformers community." The run is September 17th to 22nd, in 4K, and Fathom told ANN every one of its anniversary screenings will carry the short. My ticket has been stuck to the fridge since August 7th.

The Shout steelbook is still in limbo. TFW2005's last word, back on August 31st, was that the art on retailer listings had changed and "isn't final," and nothing newer has turned up. The pre-order listing TFormers carries gives 4K UHD, Region A (without saying which of the set's two discs that applies to), Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, November 17th, and two prices on the same page, "$49.99" in the article and "$39.98" as the listed MSRP. I'm printing both because I can't tell you which one Shout means.

Pee-wee's Playhouse is forty today. September 13th, 1986, a Saturday morning on CBS, and Galaxy High premiered the same morning, which I'd forgotten entirely. I was seven. I don't remember the first episode. I remember the talking chair, and I remember being sure the whole show had been made for me personally, which every kid in America thought, which is exactly why it worked. And on Thursday, the same day the Transformers run opens, Netflix drops season two of Stranger Things: Tales From '85.

Static

The scene's two outlets are still dark and the label behind one of them isn't. Vehlinggo hasn't posted since August 17th and newretrowave.com hasn't posted since July 29th, same as a week ago. Meanwhile the NewRetroWave YouTube channel premiered five videos between Monday and Friday, DEADLIFE, Isidor with Earmake, House Of Serpents, Michael Oakley and Thought Beings, and put a Thought Beings single on Bandcamp. The label side is busy and the writing side is dark.

The European shipping wall has a second sign on it. NRW's Bandcamp now carries this on every physical format: "STARTING JULY 1ST 2026, WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO TAKE ANY NEW PHYSICAL ORDERS FROM EU CUSTOMERS, DUE TO THE NEW EU CUSTOMS REFORM." It points EU buyers to the German shop HHV instead. BOREDOMproduct blamed the packaging rules, NRW blames customs, and the result on the buyer's side is the same closed door.

Plaion pushed the Neo Geo AES+ into next year, to September 16th, 2027. RetroRGB's write-up is the one to read: pre-orders stay open and "you can attempt to contact them for a refund if needed." The part that stings is the provenance. RetroRGB says it "was designed by Jotego and Furrtek and based off the MiSTer core," an FPGA core spun off into dedicated silicon, which is exactly the kind of thing the MiSTer crowd has wanted a company to try. Now it's a 2027 problem, and there are still no reviews of a working unit. The US store is still taking money for it: $249.99 for the console, $349.99 for the Anniversary Edition, $999.99 for the Ultimate.

I wrote Dana back on Saturday. I told her I'd played her nine seconds twenty times and couldn't swear to it either way, and that not knowing is where the whole industry is sitting this week, with a lot of very rich companies in the room. She sent back a photo of Ozzy, the beagle she also kept, asleep in front of the Polks. No caption. I'm counting it as a review.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty