Tarmvred - Viva 6581
8-bit music is being heralded as the new shit on the electronic music landscape and, while everyone is busy trying to rescue their neglected '80s circuitry so as to squeeze those thin sounds out of the resident chips, Jonas Johansson has been mangling the sound of the 8-bit chip for some time in his live shows. Tarmvred's new EP, Viva 6581, is an homage to the MOS6581 -- the soundchip which resides inside the plastic and silicon heart of the Commodore 64 and the Sidstation. While the heart of Viva 6581 may be the tiny 8-bit processor, the rest of the machine is a steam-pumping, metal-gnashing, beat-driven 21st century monster of distortion and feedback.
Some of the ultra distorted computer game music disco may be familiar to those who have seen Tarmvred perform over the last year as the four tracks of Viva 6581 utilize elements from his blistering live set. "I was a teenage robot" is the tag line that runs across the back of the t-shirts sold during that tour and Viva 6581 is the soundtrack for those awkward androids constructed of obsolete parts and the technology of the last decade. Sure, you want to dance and sing, but your gyroscopic stabilizers are all fucked up and your CPU has got a 128K bottleneck on the sound card. Your pistons misfire 75 percent of the time and your battery life is about 25 minutes when you're disconnected from the house current. But, still, you've got the funk and you've got the moves -- it is just a matter of programming loops of repetitive movements after all.
Tarmvred's Subfusc is an enduring classic of the rhythmic noise genre and Jonas has made good on his indifference to that genre label with Viva 6581 (which was produced with assistance from Johannes Hedberg). You can't call Viva 6581 a noise record any more than you can solely classify it as a 8-bit record. You can just give yourself up to the Miami Vice theme music that opens "8" and just as eagerly allow your skull to be cleansed by the caustic noise which destroys the fragile drum pads and tears the soaring synth melody out of the sky. Machines dance, shit gets broken, it is the cycle of things. But, in the end, the squelchy binary melody sneaks back in. If Subfusc was Jonas' commentary on the inevitable mechanization of humanity, Viva 6581 is the beacon of human creativity in the brittle world of ones and zeros. Even in binary systems, there are patterns; where patterns exists, you can find a beat. And is a pulse enough to be defined as being alive? Viva 6581 gives new life to the phrase "do the robot."
Tarmvred
Ad Noiseam [2003]
music
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