Charlie A - Turrican - bath remix

Hear The Track Here

Pffftt, young kids these days, what do they know? My 10 year old boys get in a right snit if something doesn't happen in their online world within the allotted two seconds they give it, how would they have coped with the internet in it's formative phase? When I first started taking it seriously, things were very different. I would have laughed in your face if you had told me 10 years ago that virtual worlds would become the norm, for most people. All I ever wanted to do was make music with it, and in the beginning this was extremely difficult. So if you want to blame someone for my unrelenting Old Codger diatribe, look no further than the o so innocent features of one Charlie Armour (for it was he). I started off by making MOD music files, tracks that were often used in computer games so - consequently - the file size had to be small. Small being UNDER 640k. 640k!!! Wtf could you get these days for 640k? I, and my fellow mod composers, made these tracks in a variety of software and Charlie has used both an Amiga 500 AND the venerable Protracker to come up with his version of the Turrican theme.

Now if anyone else had approached me with this, I'd have beat them to death with their own plinky sticks (Ed: Little felt hammers to make plinky sounds). Yes, yes, I know it would be impossible to beat someone to death with a felt hammer but just think of the anger you could vent in the attempt. So, we're all in very 1990's mode here at review central - hence the Old Codger routine - because both Turrican and the way Charlie made it brings back huge waves of sentiment about those early, stumbling days where we all learned much more than we needed to know to make our music. These days I don't know of any online internet musician who doesn't wear several dozen hats - usually at the same time - but in those days it was difficult to get information, let alone know how to apply it. So, knowing EXACTLY what Charlie would have to do to make this track helped me enormously in bringing it all back in vivid sound and colour.

Except not.

I've known Charlie A for a good while and one thing I could never complain about was his sonic fidelity. So how was he to pull this off? Obviously sample quality has improved immensely since those early days and Charlie, bless him takes full advantage of that because Turrican shows that a great tune is a great tune whether a full blown mega expense production or made on a meager (Amiga...geddit! geddit!) eight channel Mod tracker. Aaaahh, heady days, and now - thanks to Charlie A - you can get a whiff of them too.

Highly Recommended nostalgia