Confessions of a Commodore 64 remix addict 2008-05-21


I admit it, I'm impossibly geeky at times. Sometime last summer I re-discovered Commodore 64 music. Slay Radio, which primarily plays remixes of old Commodore 64 music, as well as some original tracks inspired by the era of 8-bit home computers became what I listened to while sitting in front of our open garden doors and working on Edgeio throughout most of the summer. My wife don't really consider it music, but to me it's the music that I listened the most to from '83-'84 and until at least '91. Many of the tracks are truly iconic, and feature artists that provided the soundtrack for the lives of millions of people who where kids in the 80's, yet who are virtually unknown outside a group of mostly 30-something hardcore geeks who grew up spending more of our childhood in front of our computers than chasing girls. Personally, I didn't listen to much mainstream music until the early 90's, and even since then it's mostly been incidental. But I listened to hours and hours worth of computer game music and demo music every day, and later to hours of electronic music like Jean-Michel Jarre who was perhaps the major inspiration for a large part of this sub-culture. (You can see this inspiration even now, with remixes such as Rolands Rat Race - The Quest for Jarre by Traxer, which mixes an early Martin Galway tune with a lot of Jarre influences) Before I finally left the Commodore 64 behind for the Amiga, I'd learned to love the SID music dearly. It has a special combination of minimalism (being limited to 3 voices, and with very limited space as well as having to synthesize the "instruments" from basic waveforms combined with some extremely limited sampling capabilities) and the heavy influence of Jarre and other electronic music pioneers such as Kraftwerk (who I just discovered has a wonderfully bizarre website including things such as a musical calculator) and a certain 80's flair. Most of my favorites are "obvious" - classics that in some cases made their games. Many of them are also amongst the easiest accessible for people who haven't heard the originals. Here are some of them (I didn't realize before I started putting the list together how many of these tracks are based on Rob Hubbard originals... What can I say, the man is a genius): There are many, many more (and many non-Rob Hubbard tracks too, I promise...). The hardest is to sort the many craptastic remixes from the truly great ones. Remix64.com is a fantastic resource. Now to go looking for Amiga tracks...

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