There’s never enough Commodore 64 music. While I’m waiting on my Prophet64 cart to arrive (see previous story), here’s some musical C64 reading (and listening) for you:
Rhizome’s “Voices of the 64” entry points to several useful links. Among them: a new story on soundscapes.info goes beyond the history of the technology to the masterworks of 8-bit composition. With all the (well-deserved) talk of the genius of minimalism in games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, you hear far less about the great music written for a platform like the Commodore 64 — with a better onboard synthesizer, too. Dig in for some musical inspiration, game memories, notational examples, and believe it or not, extensive footnotes and bibliography. Plenty to read there, and maybe you can make this into the world’s most enjoyable doctoral dissertation.
If the Prophet64 has made you decide to take the plunge into C64 music-making, it’s worth mentioning the C64Music! blog again. Aside from the C64 geekery, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for how to make your C64 music into a real act. I have to reprint this photo by sml, not because I’m going out of my way to rip off the good folks at Rhizome and C64Music!, but because this is clearly the way to put Kraftwerk to shame and do a computer-based stage show right. Viva Welle:Erdball. (Great name, too.) Now, if only I can get my aerial friends to do trapeze work with some C64s in-hand . . .
More soon once my new cartridge arrives. (They have started to ship; I can tell from watching the mailing list.)