W
hen we previously spoke to
Denis ‘Remute’ Karimani,
in
E331,
the Hamburg-based producer had just released Technoptimistic, a cartridge album made to play on a Mega Drive. A passionate collector of vintage consoles, videogames had already been an influence on Karimani’s music prior to this – including Play The Game, an album featuring 8- and 16bit themes for imaginary unreleased games – but the release of Technoptimistic was a turning point in his career, he says, from “a vanilla techno artist putting out vinyl records and digital downloads” to what he refers to as “Remute 2.0”. It’s perhaps the logical conclusion of his career to date, then, that he’s now made a game:
Decoder,
a visual novel based on the cult ’80s German cyberpunk film of the same name, itself a rough adaptation of the work of author William S Burroughs.
Since Technoptimistic, Karimani has experimented with the gamut of classic consoles, using their sound chips to create music that can be listened to in the usual manner or through cartridges or CDs on those machines, including The Cult Of Remute (SNES) and Living Electronics (Game Boy). In 2022, he released Unity for GBA, R64 for N64 and Generations and a CD album for Dreamcast (see ‘Generations game’). But four years on from Technoptimistic, his latest release brings him back to Sega’s console. No surprise, perhaps, given that it remains his favourite machine – an opinion shared by many other techno artists influenced by the Yamaha FM synth chip that gave Sega 16bit console gaming such a distinctive flavour, powering the likes of Yuzo Kushiro’s Streets Of Rage 2 soundtrack.