Monday, December 14, 2015

this is "Tomorrow"





a song by Electric Youth





the genre is apparently called synthwave or retrowave or  outrun   - as in being chased, or chasing in a movie scene presumably


[via Lindsay Kerr]



















the Eighties has been revived now for longer than the original Eighties lasted (yes i know I said that before, and it was a quip borrowed off someone else too - my friend / writer Rupert Howe, if i recall right!)

but still, this is getting into re-revival territory.....  a revival of a revival   

i mean, it was, what 1997, 1998 when we had i/F "space invaders are smoking grass" and the early Ectomorph and Adult. releases... 

that's 17 years ago


so, like, howzabout trying to "out-run" History, guyz and galz?



connected? 





but here the musical vector is 90s

like the minimal-but-slamming traxiness (Monolake or adam beyer 'drumcode') being made around the time of Oral-Alio etc  - the tone-not-tune techno that the 80s-back-to-melody movers were reacting against 


stop press: Andrew Briggs chips in to explain that 

" the term Outrun is a reference to the iconic 80s arcade game Out Run"

and opine thusly:

"Don't know how I feel about this genre, it seems like musical fan fiction, the point being to recreate the sonic moment of  80s Jan Hammer et al. and live in it suspended forever. An 80s mixtape recorded to DAT instead of a worn cassette."

while also recommending Rain Sword as "one of the better purveyors"


 


and point out this example of "Talking Heads retrowaved"



wow, that is actually really pretty - brings out the Naive Melody element

1 comment:

chad said...

I came across this genre a couple years back after reading an article on bands influenced by John Carpenter scores, it's not bad as background music but not something I can listen to constantly