While I've been away sleeping on floors and sitting in the van Futurnari has been further establishing himself in the chipmusic scene. Soon after Another Unlikely Hero was picked up by Bleep City comes Retrospective Forward Thinking.

This five-track EP is a synthesis of Atari 2600 and DMG music with a couple of field recordings. An interesting facet of this release is the hardware. Both the DMG (original 1989 brick Gameboy) and the Atari 2600 are subject to limitations in terms of polyphony, tracks, tempo and tuning. It is especially difficult to sync the tempo of the two devices as the Atari plays at several rather strange fixed tempos which are not whole integers. LSDJ (the Gameboy software) cannot exactly match these tempos so the longer a piece of music continues for the more incongruous it becomes.

However, Futurnari achieves this coupling with aplomb, mixing odd-time numbers (Retrospective Forward Thinking is in 7/8) with broken-beat robot-dancehall numbers like this track, Analyse:

Retrospective Forward Thinking is "the story of the creation of itself."

Grab the entire EP here.

Written by: Zach.
Tags: chipmusic, futurnari.