Selected Fmbient Works 82​-​80

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2022

Label: SoundUnbound Recordings

Enschede's local Julian van Aalderen is probably mostly known for his VJ antics under the monicker The C-Men.
Using 2 old commodore amiga 1200 computers, he's played gigs in Tokyo, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Stockholm and many more cities across the globe for almost 25 years.

After having toured extensively with many musicians using gameboys, atari's and commodore computers, Julian decided to make music on the first home computer he ever owned as a kid, the MSX. He released his debut on the famous 8 bit peoples weblabel, a cd release on Japan's Cheap Beats label, as well as contributing various tracks for compilations. Mostly inspired by mid 90's electronic music like Autechre, Phoenecia, Skam records and Rephlex, the music under the Poke-1,170 pseudonym sounds melancholic, complex and usually dark in nature.

As poke -1,170, Julian makes music on an even more outdated machine: a Philips nms 8280 MSX computer. In the early 80's, Microsoft and ASCII Japan teamed up to make a new standard in home computing, the MSX. Many big Japanese companies like Sony, Panasonic, Casio and Samsung released countless of different models that were mutually compatible with eachother. In the Netherlands, Philips was the manufacturer that made the MSX brand popular.
However, some of these machines were fitted with built in video digitizers, laserdisc systems and the first cd-roms, as well as a large number of different sound add-ons.
Not happy with the built-in sound capabilities, Konami integrated their own custom soundchip, the SCC in some of their game cartridges, like Solid Snake (metal gear 2).
Yamaha, the inventor of the FM sound standard, produced low-budget versions of FM chips that were used in various soundcartriges, like the Philips Music Module, Panasonic's FM-PAC, and built into later msx2+ and msx turbo-R models.


The Sound Unbound release consists of 16 ambient tracks, mostly written during the lockdowns of the Covid-19 Pandemic, resulting in pensive, moody and unsettling tracks.