Pitchfork

"This is my world-- it stinks, don't it?", Jacky Hughes said to Newsweek in a Nov. 16, 1981 piece about how video games-- and the billions of Washingtons they stole-- had fingerprinted the American fabric. The article mentioned that our man described himself as a "Times Square drifter who can shine in the Broadway arcades." Hughes added, "When you start to think you're a loser, you come here and get 4,000 at Space Invaders, and you ain't a loser anymore."

I'll drink to that. Maybe there is a connection between losing half of my childhood to my Nintendo systems plus the local corner shop's arcade and my present affection for mutated techno. The dinner jazz for a barbarian movie juxtaposed with swords slashing metal as heard in stage two of Strider engrosses me in a daze as much as how Autechre exploits my skull as a punching bag in their number, "Surripere". However, I could also blame most of my future health problems and failures to bearably socialize on the ungodly video game, if so many child shrinks and Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl would tell me. If anything, there is no worse hangover than the one from playing a game like Advance Wars for 10 hours straight-- the eye strain, the purples and red visages burned into your retinas, and the impulse to run back and forth into a trance to resuscitate that buzz.

Traces of such bygone anxiety and bliss awake whenever I hear Secede's remix of an Ilkae tune. Someone is first overheard playing a Nintendo Gameboy Advance game as its erratic rings and squelched "power-up" noises attest. A dazed department-store lobby Muzak organ then kicks in to lead a rousing techno-pop jaunt akin to a game's victory music when the planner beats a level. The melody remains faithful to video-game synthesizers, and it's simultaneously elating and queasy. On Ilkae's 2001 album, Pistachio Island, Canadian and Polish teenagers Aaron Munson and Krystian Lubiszewski wore their deficient attention spans and zest for what seemed like imaginary video game soundtracks on an IDM tip. The elements were all there in its 45 tracks: rhythms that could accelerate or die off in a moment, 8-bit synth melodies, and the nagging feeling that you should feel guilty for playing with children's toys.

For Bovine Rearrangement, Pistachio gets remixed by Ilkae's brethren in the post-techno underground, namely from the Merck stable. The 19 results mostly score pointers for enhancing what were typically one to two minute sketches on the original album. No specific remixed tracks were named on the CD cover. Explicitly furthering the Nintendo vibe is Vim! who throws together an erratic medley of accurate Gameboy Advance-level jingles that seemingly change whenever the artist is bored with a level. Daedelus deepens Ilkae's melancholia with drifting organ drones and laundry dryer-like percussion. Even stronger are Machine Drum's fountainhead washed synths and broken hip-hop beats, and Octopus Inc.'s psychosomatic flashbacks.

The rest of Bovine dwells in the music box fetish or downtempo meditations that drift with a head hanging down through the spotless, glass-domed megapolises that so much post-techno/armchair techno/IDM has indulged in for so many years. While it's not progress, these blues can still make losers feel like winners, however the natural light burns their eyes as they stagger out of the arcades.