Betty Beep

Hey, so I haven’t really updated this thing in an extremely long time. I’ve been in Lucknow, India, studying Urdu, and haven’t really had time to update. So I’m sorry about that. On the plus side, I’ve heard a bunch of great tunes in the last year or so since I posted, so I’ll try to get through some of them. I’m starting grad school at Berkeley (where I also did my undergrad) in a couple months, but I hope I’ll have the willpower required to force myself to play on the computer every so often.

Let’s see if I can play against type and not just post some Indian thing. My friend Alex, who follows all the phenomenal music that comes out of Scandinavia much more closely than I do, gave me this album called 8BP050, which is a chiptune compilation, basically dance music made with Gameboys and other low-fi beepy things. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Switchblade Squadron,” by Covox, who appears to be a Swede named Thomas Söderlund. I never had a Gameboy, or even any other kind of video game platform, making me probably the only American born in the ’80s who doesn’t know all the names of the different characters and bad guys in Mario Bros. Nor do I think of myself as someone who really likes electronic stuff all that much. Regardless, this is a hell of a catchy, upbeat, beepy little song, and a bunch of the other numbers on the album are pretty good, too. The whole thing is a great driving soundtrack, especially now it’s summer, and you can tool around with the windows down, thinking about how cool you are for listening to music that little 8×8 characters would dance to if they were at a little on-screen nightclub in 1989.

Covox – Switchblade Squadron