House king and closet computer nerd Kerri Chandler unveils a new album inspired by his love of video games.

The album arrives on DJ Deep’s Deeply Rooted House label, and follows on from the US house producer’s Computer Games 12-inch from 2007. One track from that record, ‘The Invaders (The Panic)’ charted at #22 in our Top 30 tracks of 2007, and the album promises more in the same vein with tracks inspired by the blips and beeps of classic video games.

Chandler's love for video games is a longstanding one. As a kid he even learned how to program game machines: "It began about 24 years ago with a machine called the Challenger 2P. When we weren't messing around with turntables, we were learning how to program this machine. So every day we would sit there at my friend’s house and take turns at his house programming this machine which was in Basic. Neither one of us could type so it took days to get a page of code done. But it was magic when we got the programming right! The first game we made was a game that had the USS enterprise shooting a little black and white dot.”

But Chandler's geek cred runs even deeper. He later moved onto building and modding game machines: “We would get parts and hack the machines and build things to make music and whatever else we could dream up. The parts were cheap, so we were able to experiment. We got hold of all sorts of machines and modified and programmed them: Trs80's, Timex Sinclair, Atari 400 and 800, Commodore 64, Pet 2001, IBM PC JR, Magnavox Odyssey, etc. But no matter what machine we used, we always programmed some kind of game. So about 3 years went by and I got my hands on a Compaq portable (it wasn't really all that portable by today's standards) but that's when I learned how machines and music could be combined (Mpu 401 and Texture). So here it is 24 years later and I'm re-living my childhood and digging out all these old machines to make music again.”

Along with the album comes a gear list. Machines sampled on Computer Games include the Commodore pet 2001, Sega Dreamcast, Vectrex, Challenger 2P, Odyssey, X-box, opl-3 hacked sound card, IBM PC Jr, Trs-80, C64, Intellivision, Pet 2001, Atari, Speak and Spell, Nomad, 8086 & 8088 and Turbografx.

Tracklist

CD0

1 intro for o
2 Fortran
3 DOWN
4 Kong
5 LASER-1
6 ESC
7 General-gameplay
8 Space Invaders
9 The Chip Hack(Opl-3)
10 POWERON
11 Vector Graphics Long Edit
12 beat sown
13 Wait 6502
14 echo lasers

CD1

1 intro
2 OPL-3
3 Pong(Panning ball mix)
4 crazy bonus
5 Not On Vinyl Moon Bounce Original
6 Locked out
7 SHOOTING
8 the box
9 Last Man Up
10 arcade
11 Reset
12 T6

’Computer Games’ by Kerri Chandler will be released on Deeply Rooted House on February 25, 2008. 9 Comments