Baychimo – Magical Keygen
Brilliant piece from Danish artist Baychimo (Frederik Meyer), from his latest full-length Personality Computer. The album is an ode to the optimism of nascent Y2K internet culture, its atmosphere of exploratory hopefulness, and lack of cynicism. Specifically, this song pays tribute to the often gorgeous — but anonymous and completely ephemeral — songs that accompanied software keygens, which were presumably made by the crackers themselves or their friends. While this doesn’t incorporate the 8-bit elements that regularly dominated keygen music, it nevertheless captures the swelling dream-like quality of many of those forgotten bits. The album covers a lot of territory, and doesn’t just focus on the small tertiary joys of piracy, but I am also including one more that manages to capture another side of that sort of keygen music (with a title that also implies as much). It evokes the more frenetic stuff that accompanied some keygens, the sort that had you quickly reaching for the little white knob on your Altec Lansings so you wouldn’t wake up your parents. Meyer was generous enough to let me share the mp3 for one of these with you here (fair to expect that, given the subject matter), but do grab the rest of the album on bandcamp, or find it for streaming all over.
Baychimo – “Magical Keygen”
Baychimo – “E-Shoplifting”
Fangstar Forever – W8
Up next, a weird, impossible-to-define, sort of magical tune from Guatamalan artist Fangstar Forever. It feels like some sort of incantation, the kind of surreal thing that one might experience in a DMT trip, out of time and space. That may be a hyperbolic description, but sometimes a song feels to me like it is just pure flow, the product of an autotelic experience where — in Csikszentmihalyi’s terms — the process itself was the artist’s reward, not the eventual result. That’s not to say the result isn’t valuable; it most certainly can be for the listener, as is the case here. This feels like the raw ego of youth, self-important in a pure and unfiltered way, unshaped by social expectations, or at least a confident middle finger in the face of those expectations. I know nothing about this guy, but I envy his access to his own water source. Fangstar Forver has kindly let me share the mp3 with you here, but you can find this and his other two releases on bandcamp for pay-what-you-wish (or for streaming all over).
Fangstar Forever – “W8”
ERRx – ether
Two more lovely ambient dnb / jungle / breakcore tunes from anonymous artist ERRx, who I’ve covered several times before. The first, “ether,” is far too short at just over a minute long, led by a pining, sweetly melodramatic melody atop resampled pads and straightforward resequenced breakbeats. This is the blueprint for this kind of thing these days, and it works swimmingly well. The second, “rebirth,” uses slightly grittier percussion and relies more on choppy chords, but maintains the aesthetic well. These are both prerelease singles from ERRx’s upcoming Chaotic Digital full-length, out next month, but you can grab each on bandcamp now (or stream wherever).
ERRx – “ether”
ERRx – “rebirth”