Master Boot Record - C:\>COPY *.* A: /V

I found this project on Bandcamp during my finals week two weeks ago and I’m glad I did. It’s an entirely instrumental effort (or vocal-less effort, if you’re old-time-y and rigid with your definition of an instrument in music) and it blends the highly technically riveting keyboard-esque sounds of chiptune (a genre/movement I can’t claim to have much expertise on) with very organic but mechanically orchestrated and groovy death metal. The end result is an album that reminds me of the parts of Dream Theater songs when everyone but James LaBrie is helping each other build a gigantic prog metal tower of sound, specifically the times when Jordan Rudess is given the floor to dazzle the listener. Considering how lifeless this project could have potentially come out (as well as the previous records that all came out in 2016), it’s impressive how imaginative this album can be a lot of the time, not just by it being saved with the raw evisceration of the heavy death metal instrumentation, but with the chiptune elements being immersed into the music rather than just laid over or under the guitars and drums and actually contributing to the dynamic of the record. The titles of the songs and the albums seem to be derived from computer technical language/programming and I cannot provide any insight into what the titles imply because it’s totally not my field of expertise. Whoever is in charge of this project seems to be very active right now and I am excited for what is yet to come from, I wish I had a better understanding of computer programming and chiptune so that I could say more about this, but I think that for the likely many people who don’t know about the combination of these two genres, it’ll probably be something to try out to test the style as a whole, and I think this album provides a strong assertion for the productivity of the combination of these two styles. 

This (down there) is where it all comes from. I also really enjoy the album C:\>CHKDSK /F. Big support to whoever’s been making this stuff, keep it up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more