Retro gaming fans all over the world will have undoubtedly heard of Remute. He’s a German techno artist & DJ who, rather than releasing music through the usual channels of CDs and Spotify, produces new albums that can be played exclusively on a variety of different retro consoles. He was the first person to ever make an album for the PC Engine and has spent the past 5 years of his career releasing albums for everything from the Game Boy DMG to the Atari Jaguar.
I first came across Remute back in January 2022. I had just opened up the laptop after a long break for Christmas and my Birthday when I discovered his R64 album. An entire album on an N64 cartridge that listeners had to plug in to listen to – it was too good not to delve into further, and I’ve been a keen follower of Remute’s career ever since.
The interview that follows is put together from snippets of our chat with Remute on episode #074 of the Retrospect Podcast. We had the pleasure of talking about everything from home studios to live performances, new releases, and how Remute gets into the mindset of recording music for specific retro consoles. If you’re a fan of Remute’s work, then make sure to give the full episode a listen, but for now… take it away, Remute!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Remute
RD: Hello Remute! Let’s start off with you giving us an introduction to what you’ve been up to over the last 20 years and how you’ve got to where you are today making music for weird and wacky consoles.
Remute: Hi, guys. Nice to be here. So my name is Remute. I’ve been making music for approximately 20 years now. But over the last five years, I started putting out my music on video game cartridges and some other video game media. Because I’m also an avid video game collector, I have a great video game collection as well as a synthesizer collection. And I’ve been a huge gaming fan since forever!
Remute: And so it felt just organic to merge these two worlds and put out my music on the media I prefer. So yeah, I started putting out my first album for video game consoles in 2019 for the Mega Drive. It was Techno Pimisco. I think the Mega Drive has always been my favorite console regarding sound because it has a really good FM synthesizer built in by Yamaha. And so this choice was a very clear thing for me to make an album first on the Mega Drive, because for me, it’s the best sound. Yeah, it was pretty successful.
RD: So you started out with one of our favourite consoles and have gone on to cover pretty much every other handheld and home console since. Tell us a little bit more about your back catalogue, and we’ve heard whispers that you’ve got a new album coming out soon too!
Remute: Well, the next console was the Super Nintendo or Super Famicom, as it’s called in Japan. It’s pretty different than the Mega Drive because it’s all sample-based. And so I thought, like, having an FM sound album and a sample base album is also a good choice. And so, yeah, so I continued putting out music on a lot of game consoles.
Remute: I did albums for Game Boy, for Game Boy Advance, but also for some very niche stuff, like Atari Jaguar which felt like making music for the Amiga computer. And the newest album that I can tell you about it is for… It’s coming out in October for the Philips CDI.
RD: Oh, nice, tell us more about that and where our readers can get their hands on it!
Remute: It’s called Dream Machine and the pre-sale has already started. And so we can expect some interesting new journeys from Remute. It’s available from remute.bandcamp.com and will be available in two editions. One will be the CD, but another deluxe edition will be with my Dream Machine Display, a HD display featuring all of the album in HD!
The Challenges Of Making Music For Retro Media
RD: What was the most challenging console to work with in terms of just tech, maybe ideas, maybe just challenges that you can put your mind to pixel almost?
Remute: Yeah, I think really the most challenging album was for Super Nintendo because you really have to strip down your musical ideas to 64 kilobytes of file size. It’s like nothing; it’s like a Word document, I think. That was really the hardest task of all – to compress all the samples in such a way that they still sound like something and not like trash. This was the album that I’m most proud of because somehow I managed, together with my programmer, to make some quite decent sounds and I’m still really happy about it. And yeah, this was my most challenging album.
RD: We were talking to Jordan Mechner who created Prince of Persia, and he was telling us about the challenges of making music when he first created Prince of Persia and how he had to transpose his music down into small beeps. And you’ve kind of done a similar thing; you’ve taken this quite complicated music form with a similar kind of process, obviously at different periods of time. But it’s nice to see that you’re doing something today that was challenging back then, but you’re still finding different ways to make it happen now.
Remute: Yeah, it’s definitely a quite similar process because the music for my Super Nintendo album, which, as I said, it’s all sample-based, was basically first recorded with all my vintage synths that you can see here. Then I was taking the best bits and best sequences of these recordings and somehow tried to compress them down. It was a really hard task to do because the data recorded with all the stuff was pretty huge in the beginning.
Getting Into The Creative Zone
RD: When you sit down to write for the Mega Drive or when you sit down to write for the N64, are you thinking about the technology and the games that you played on those consoles while you’re writing your music? Are you thinking about Banjo-Kazooie and Zelda when writing for the N64 or are you more thinking about the feelings that these games might have given you… or are you simply thinking, okay, I know what I need to do because of the chips that are inside this thing?
Remute: When I’m thinking of Dreamcast for example, I’m thinking of the early 2000s and it really gets me into another mood. Like, I remember remembering the sounds that were, like, around at the beginning of the early 2000s and it really gets me in a different mood than when I’m just sitting here on my synthesizers and doing some stuff. And well, when I’m thinking of certain consoles, it really changes my mindsets towards making music. And so when I think, for example, let’s make an album for Dreamcast, then I get in the mood of the early 2000s. And this triggers a lot of other ideas than I get usually. And so, yeah, making music for certain consoles really… it’s really helpful to develop ideas that are different than the stuff I’m doing usually.
RD: Do you ever do anything a little bit wacky, like perhaps record the hardware sounds or anything a little bit different, maybe even peripherals that you’ve got your hands on to make extra sounds and clips?
Remute: Yeah, definitely. When I’m working on new ideas, I first use all my synthesizers here and my audio digital workstation. And then I just basically record hours and hours of material and hours of sounds which get analyzed afterward. It really can take a whole night of a jam, basically. And so when I have enough material, I check it out and think ‘What the hell did I just record?’ And sometimes there are good ideas in it, sometimes not. And so, yeah, it’s really a very organic process and a case of going with the flow.
Using Retro Consoles During Live Shows
RD: Do you have any kind of retro themes in your live performances? One thing that I’ve been thinking about is do you actually sell the cartridges on the merch table? Because I can imagine people coming over and saying, ‘Oh look, there’s a Game Boy cartridge there… is that a Mega Drive cartridge? What’s happening here?’
Remute: I just had a nice performance at this year’s Gamescom in Cologne. It’s a really nice gig. When I perform live, I also really try to incorporate some video game consoles or some computers. For example, I’m using the C64 quite often as a MIDI synthesizer because I have a video game to play for it. As I said, the C64 is a really nice analog synth, and so it would be a shame to not use it live. But I’m also using some quite modern stuff for other arrangements and mixing and audio.
Remute: And yes, as you said, on most gigs, there’s also a merch table where you can buy my stuff, of course. If you really like it, then you can go there and buy some cartridges. I think some cartridges are already sold out, like for example, the PC Engine cartridge sold out. I don’t think that it will be remade because that one was also really hard to make (and you can find out why by listening to the rest of the Podcast at the bottom of this interview!)
Remute’s Retro Gaming Past
RD: I want to talk about your retro gaming history. Where did it begin for you? As a child, what was your first console, your first handheld, your first game, your first accessory?
Remute: I think my first home computer was the C64 I got from my parents when I was four or five years old. They gave me a C64 and told me like ‘Here, become a programmer!’ And so what I was doing was playing games, of course, and I was really hooked on the games that came with the C64. I think my parents bought it from some guy here in Hamburg, and he included a bunch of floppy disks full of games and some demo scene productions of the late 80s. And so somehow I, as a little child, was able to load this stuff and watch all these demos and play all these amazing games.
Remute: And so after that, I got an Amiga computer. But then I think my first game console was the Game Boy after that. In the early 90s, of course, I was a huge fan of the Super Nintendo and also the Mega Drive. I was a huge fan of Sweets of Rage 2 because of the sound. The sound was really amazing and probably one of the first touch points with electronic dance music for me. And yeah, my mind was blown.
RD: How easy is it to track down retro consoles for you to work on your releases?
Remute: Tracking down hardware today isn’t so easy, actually, because the prices have gone really parabolic. And especially some rare, niche stuff like the 3DO or also the Neo Geo, of course, is getting absolutely over-absurdly expensive. Fortunately, I have been collecting these consoles for many years. The prices 15 years ago were not so high, and you can always track consoles down on eBay here in Germany, or eBay Kleinanzeigen; it’s the local eBay where you can pick up some local stuff. And fortunately, I had the luck to build a quite huge collection for a good price.
Remute: I made music for the Game Boy and for the Game Boy Advance. The next album after my CDI release will be also for handhelds, but a surprise.
RD: We’re guessing the Game Gear… this could be a little exclusive that we might have to wait and see if we’re right about!
Remute: Yeah, surprise, surprise. But I think the next handheld album will already come out this year, probably at the end of this year. And I’m also working on re-releasing the Game Boy album ‘Living Electronics’ because it’s sold out for a while and a lot of fans are asking for a repress. And I think finally next year, I think I will bring it back.
Thanks to Remute for joining us on the Retrospect Podcast and discussing possibly the most unique method of releasing new music we’ve ever come across! His work is incredibly interesting, and we certainly learned a thing or two about how difficult it is to write music for game cartridges over the course of our chat! You can listen to the full episode below and find out about Remute’s career, his studio, previous releases, making music for video games, and much more!
