Coleco Music

"Confessions In A Chatroom" (EP, 2006)

Jaunty six-track digital download available for free from the terrific 8-Bit Peoples label. If you know the Coleco was a rather cool (8-bit) home video game system from the mid 1980s then you probably don't need telling this is a collection of retro videogame inspired music created using museum/gallery worthy game tech, computers, toy keyboards and a vocoder.

Argentinean Pavlo Vertical is behind Coleco Music and his preferred approach here is to produce a series of often fairly short in-game music style melodies including raspy percussion. The technical approach may be old-fashioned, but the topic is contemporary with each track title exploring a different aspect of life in online chatrooms. So we have oddly matter-of-fact and descriptive titles like: Please Add Me, Honey, We Are Chatting and She Appears To Be Offline. In contrast to my usual preference for instrumentals (though all those here work just fine), it's the tracks featuring a smattering of gloriously low-fi vocodered vocals (usually repeating a simple refrain) that really stick in your memory, especially the wonderful Coleco Says: How Are You?. Slight, but great fun - and its free! Get down(loading). 7/10

Rob Dyer (October 2009)