Danger - 09/17 2007 EP - 4h30 CityRiders Teaser (via The2emedanger)

As far as teaser videos for music releases go, this 16-bit era inspired pixel animation does the fucking trick for me. The rough and grimy look of early 90s beat-em-ups, Double Dragon and Streets of Rage, with its bright coloured mohawked and sexually-ambiguous baddies, in dank run-down urban environments, is one that doesn’t get much play anymore. Everything is too fucking slick now, from sharp high definition displays to 100% accurate digital music reproductions to every post-effect applied to every film and photograph to fix every mistake. It’s boring.

By contrast, those dirty beat-em-ups of the early 90s took their influence from the rough and weird gang-land punk films of the late 70s and early 80s, like The Warriors and Escape from New York, copied over and distorted on VHS with soundtracks on cassette and syndicated and broadcast over the airwaves to your wood-paneled giant TV with a UHF dial in your parents basement. Perfection wasn’t important, just being able to access the content was the goal. Nothing was as ubiquitous as it is now. The fringe shit took a lot of effort and doing to find.

That’s why chiptunes, and the recent trend of faux-80s retro, and cassette based underground drone releases, and lo-fi distorted disco and folk (Nite Jewel and Grouper) appeal so much. It isn’t just the nostalgic chic of the sound that they produce as much as it’s their embrace of the limits and imperfections of technology. It’s more human that way.

But I’ll still buy their releases in FLAC.

PS. The other teaser is just as rad