► Omri Suleiman – Music For a 15 Year Old Me

A lot of chipmusic releases today is either “modern” or “chip”. Very few artists seem to pull off both, at the same time. This is exactly what Omri Suleiman does!

Music For a 15 Year Old Me builds on an oft-forgotten origin of chipmusic (crack intros) and fuses it with techno, house and UK hardcore from the 1990s. The results? A new future for chipmusic!

Stream and download for free at http://chipflip.org/05.

Crafted by the long-lost Amiga scene musician Omri Suleiman, it fuses dancefloor bass with sound tracker magic to form a refreshing mixture of crack intro mystics and dancefloor energy. Occasionally it has a similar machinic atmosphere to that of early Autechre, and other times it sounds like skilled guitar solos and computer ballads. As a plus, the original files all fit on a single floppy disk!

As usual, Chipflip doesn’t try to emulate the album form. Instead, this is more similar to a music disk with its eerie PETSCII  interface by Raquel Meyers and GotoAT. The MP3-archive is also available at archive.org.

Music For a 15 Year Old Me is Omri’s attempt to reach back to his teenage self, back when he was working with Amiga groups like Anarchy, Magnetic Fields and Scoopex. He was making chipmusic before the term even existed. Omri:

At that time maybe we referred to them more often as intro tunes, rather than chiptunes. The requirement that, after the copy protection was removed, a crack intro to publicise the group could be placed in the unused first sector of the floppy disk meant that the music had to be less than 10kb in size.

Eventually, Omri also started to perform in the London underground scene in acts like Afterglow and Invisible Technologies. They played live using two Amigas and a Yamaha music computer. While most of that music has been lost today (Raw EP on Beautiful Records is an exception), it is clear that Music For a 15 Year Old Me picks up on the ambience of Detroit techno, early UK hardcore and house. The process behind the release is also a nod back to himself:

To consider the only relevant audience to be, me, 20ish years ago – frees the creative process of considerations and conformities and fashion which can sometimes limit my approach to writing music.

In order to facilitate this concept, all of the songs have been produced using only a sound tracker type program (Milkytracker in this case), with the only sample editing being that available inside the tracker.

Which also means : no filters, no reverbs, no synths, no channel EQs or compression, no effects apart from those you program yourself by manipulating the pitch, volume or sample offset.

Here’s hoping that teenage Omri will pick up on this release, and respond with some more Suleiman music. To read Omri’s own words about this release, visit musicfora15yearoldme.com.