Y2K EZ PERFORMA CLASSICS!, by Pixel Archipelago

Y2K EZ PERFORMA CLASSICS!

by Pixel Archipelago

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1.	Upgrade to Mac OS 8! 02:16	buy track
2.	Pop on a Rainy Day 01:52	buy track
3.	Last Lovers Arc 03:13	buy track
4.	Night, Mist, City, Neon 02:16	buy track
5.	Escape Velocity 01:51	buy track
6.	Space-Go-Round 01:42	buy track
7.	Whirl 02:55	buy track
8.	The Secret Life of Plants 03:33	buy track
9.	The Wishing Tree 05:04	buy track
10.	Wet Cold Streets 01:52	buy track
11.	River of Circles 02:10	buy track
12.	Nimbulus 03:51	buy track
13.	In the Hands of the Miners 03:39	buy track
14.	Forest of Vines 03:04	buy track
15.	Tiki Sunflowers 07:12	buy track
16.	"The Boy Scout Song" 03:33	buy track

about

Back in the year 2000, I was just finishing high school. My internet was still dial-up, facebook didn't exist, most people my age did not have cell phones and most households had a single shared computer, browsing the internet with Netscape Navigator or America Online. It was a different time.

On my "state-of-the-art" Macintosh Performa 6400/200, I spent most of my free time writing terrible MIDI songs on a demo version of Easy Beat, which was actually a pretty sweet little MIDI sequencer that used the built-in Quicktime MIDI sound library from Mac OS 8. It even had a guitar tab view, which was how I composed, since I could not read music very well. The demo was limited to 30 bars of music, a limitation which I cleverly skirted by writing everything at 30 BPM in 1/64th note resolution.

I knew very little of music theory but was a bit obsessed with odd time signatures, and in an effort to make my miniature compositions sound slightly less cheesy, I made liberal use of pitch-shifting on the drums, as well as built-in reverb, chorus, and panning effects, as well as the glitchy aliasing sounds that occurred when certain patches were played in the very highest octave that MIDI supports and pitch-bent further upward. I was definitely overtaxing the 200 MHz CPU (or maybe it was the 16 MB of RAM), and you can hear it in the way the drums drift off the clock periodically or the release of the sounds gets cut off prematurely. Some tracks are so bad you almost can't tell if the time is swing or straight!

When I got a new computer to go off to college--a Dell PC running Windows ME--I decided to preserve my stupid MIDI songs by recording them as audio files running from the headphone jack on the Performa to the mic input jack on the Dell. Amazingly, I've managed to hold on to those songs across more than 10 different computer migrations and at least 15 moves up and down the west coast.

Fast forward almost 20 years and I rediscovered the old recordings of those MIDI songs, and decided to give them a bit of a vaporwave make-over and release them to the world. So what you have here is a collection of the "best" of the 40 or so songs that survived. There's a sort of manic maximalist glee to these compositions, with a surprising amount of intricacy and sophistication that I've kind of lost over the years as I've drifted more toward minimalism, so I think they make a fascinating time capsule of myself from literally half a lifetime ago.

The artwork, though--to make that, I actually setup a virtual machine running Mac OS 8, installed ClarisWorks on it, and assembled some vintage clipart!

credits

released March 26, 2019

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about

Pixel Archipelago Portland, Oregon

Soothingly discombobulating broken lullabies and fragmented mantras.

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