Obsolete

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In a sense, yes, obsolete. Yet as with old science fiction, this is music which transparently reveals the time period it was produced in, yet still manages to look forward from afar. To conjure the future whilst residing in the past. Anachronistic, yes. Out of time, yes. Obsolete, possibly. Huge fun though. Time's Up seems to be an organisation dedicated to preserving the early golden age of computer and video games (on a Commodore 64 tip, for those that care about such things. Which I do, as I had a Spectrum). Anyway, Time's Up encountered, or enlisted, "B.Z. and Marc 9", two shadowy characters who've compiled five tracks of curiously displaced techno out of the musical interstitials, sound fx, and title themes to early arcade, video and computer game classics. To this ear, the games would seem to come from throughout the 80s, from a wide variety of platforms and games and I guess it is, perhaps, the ultimate geekboy trainspotter fetish item. The music is somewhat primitive, given the source material, with the rollicking tempo, hyperreal melodrama, and repetitive motifs you'd expect from a tapestry of game soundtracks, though Time's Up have cleverly produced an amalgam of compressed 80s synth sounds and contemporary sampladelic techno. It comes on a cute 3" CD, for me recalling the weird and wonderful variety of storage devices which proliferated throughout 80s home computing ("home computing" - how quaint that sounds given our dotcom delusions). Ultimately, it'll prove utterly seductive for any veterans of a million and one fictional space wars of the early 80s. The individual sounds will be instantly familiar and are, of course, totally dated, despite the smart collage by Time's Up, but what's attractive is remembering the (perhaps naive) belief in the future engendered by that rush of progress: from the 1 kilobyte RAM of the ZX80 to to the almost supercomputer-like BBC-Bs and Commodore 64s; from "Wargames" in the cinema to synth-pop in the charts; heady days when the future promised to be forever Macintosh Lisa, and Outlook Express wasn't even a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye. I'm not sure how broadly attractive this music will be, but it will raise a faint smile and twitch the trigger finger for those of us whose introduction to electronic music was more Horace Goes Skiing than Pierre Henry.