Antarctica Starts Here.

Yesterday afternoon while backstroking around in the Olympic-sized swimming pool of RSS feeds that is my Google Reader account I stumbled across a link in the blog Cyberpunk Review to an album recorded and released by Colin Timothy Gagnon called Cyberpunk. Feeling curious because their recommendations are more hit than miss, I downloaded the album from Colin's website (it's free, though if you enjoy it there is a Paypal donation link to show Colin some love), decompressed it into my .mp3 collection, and gave it a listen this afternoon. If you're expecting industrial music or something along the lines of older Hate Department or Psykosonik you're not going to find it. Between the years of 2002 and 2008 Gagnon wrote eleven tracks in the style of the background music of late 80's/early 90's sci-fi video games. The idea wasn't to write music that you'd hear if you were living in one of those worlds but stuff that you would hear if you were playing a game or watching a movie of that particular genre to provide atmosphere. Some of it's pleasant, some of it sounds like the action is about to heat up, and some of it sounds like boss music. The lead synth and associated melodies keep making me wonder if I'm listening to an Overclocked Remix of a tune that I should really remember from my misspent youth, the bass line gives me happy .mod and .s3m flashbacks, and the way the different parts are arranged sounds like it came right out of a game like Bloodnet or Burn:Cycle. I find that I can set the album playing in the background and not be too distracted to do anything else while still enjoying it.

I enjoyed it and think it's well worth a download, so give it a listen and see what you think. You can use the embedded player on the page rather than pulling down the entire archive if that's how you roll. I'll be adding Cyberpunk to my iProduct to make the daily commute a little bit more pleasant.