Turrican

I might keep throwing these up at random intervals for the rest of the year, since this is the third time I've been compelled to do it.  Here's another game that had insanely good music: Turrican.  There was a lot of stadium rock pomp in it, and some hard edged housey kind of stuff.  All hi-tempo hi-energy to go with all the bullets spraying everywhere and the weird lazer that got longer and longer and spun around from the crotch area. Sure there's nothing in that.

Shadow of the Beast

I'm whetting your appetite for a hugely exciting, and exclusive, 8-bit upload with my second childhood gaming revisitation: The in game music for Shadow of the Beast. This music has stayed with me my entire lifetime since loading up the game for the first time at the age of 9, when I used to let the music play for what seemd like hours. Just looping that creepy atmosphere round and round, then letting the riff hit me over and over.

There was the loading screen introduction music, which even if you could skip you wouldn't have wanted to, and then you get to the game and this happens. Incredible.

Ikonika - Contact, Want, Love, Have

I am just getting heavily into Ikonika's  Contact, Want, Love, Have album now. It's so busy with ideas and a complete lack of seriousness but at the same time it just blows away loads of nerdy versions of the same kind of stuff, shifting chiptune (if not the actual genre then at least, 8-bit nostalgia) into a dubstep environment in a more sophisticated way than similar artists like Quarta330 who seem to just drive the plasticky sound hard without tricking it out with the kind of depth of structure or tone that is on this record. Herein lies a wealth of polyrhythms, melodic counterpoint and samples - the Streets of Rage owned R.E.S.O.L.; the amphetamine pulse rush of  They Are Losing The War; the pixellated airehorns pushing the warehouse jump up of Sahara Michael; all utter genius - almost timeless in the way they straddle generationakl eras of technology.  I was a bit skeptical when someone in The Wire included Joy Orbison under the Hypnagogic umbrella, but listing to this album that makes more sense - the timelessness here is the refraction of the Megadrive/SNES sounds through all the dance musics of the last 10 years and pushed through a future/modern filter, thus creating that distorted sense of a past imagined a discombobulated, recency-influenced rememberance, the essence of hypnogogia.

So yeah, I am well into this record, and for the now this is my favourite track by far: