Sega Mega Drive-derived techno
Who They?
Remute is a Hamburg-based DJ and electronic artist Denis Karimani, a man with a penchant for the retro. His most recent offering, ‘Technoptimistic’, was released not on vinyl, but on the cartridge more commonly found hosting a Sega Mega Drive game. He refers to it as a “plug and play” album.
Why Remute?
All the tracks on ‘Technoptimistic’ were made using the console’s FM-sound chip, lending its unique chiptune style, according to Remute, “somewhere between Detroit, Tokyo and Dusseldorf”. “Not a single sound of this album is technically a ‘recording’,” he explains. “Every time the listener switches the console on and electricity flows through the circuits, the songs get generated and played back in real-time by the sound chip.” Quite an achievement, considering a Mega Drive cartridge is only four megabytes in size. Cramming 16 songs into it, especially the very catchy ‘Instant’, should be criminal. But we’re not complaining.
Tell Us More…
He likes a challenge does our Remute. In 2017, he released ‘Limited’ which, true to its name, was an album contained entirely on a floppy disk. So that’s 1.44 megabytes in total, rather than four. Both ‘Limited’ and ‘Technoptimistic’ propel Remute’s manifesto about marrying man and machine and proving old school formats still have life in the 21st century. “The term ‘digitization’ triggers dystopian fears and worries,” he says. “I wanted to provide a soundtrack for an optimistic vision of a technologic future with man and machine in unison.” We won’t argue with that, when it sounds as good as this.
‘Technoptimistic’ is out via Bandcamp
