16 BIT SESSIONS is where James tries to figure out all this Mega Drive music business by covering songs and trying out different sounds. This time, it’s a cover of It’s Too Bad Disco’s Dead by the first True New Wave band of the 21st Century, ANALOG.

Here’s the original!

ANALOG is a New Wave band from Toronto that recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of their first live performance. As someone who knows how tough it is to keep projects and friendships and musical relationships exciting for ANY amount of time, 10 years is crazy and excellent and it’s something to celebrate.

I know ANALOG through one half of its members, Rob Lee. Rob’s a great guy who has a whole lot of talent in many different sides of the music industry – performance, filming, photography, DJ sets. The man needs a big kitchen to house the many pies he has his fingers in.

Recently I was asked to guest host my favourite night in Toronto, NINTENDO KNIGHTS, with my good friend Vee. Nintendo Knights is a monthly live show/video game tournament held at Handlebar (first Thursday of every month!) and creator/usual host Mike Reynolds was on his honeymoon, so we filled in. It was exciting, but it was short notice and securing live acts is not the easiest thing to do at the best of times! Rob very kindly offered to perform a special DJ set for us after the tournament. It was a blast and I’m very grateful for the fact that he stepped up at short notice and saved us. The night was a huge amount of fun and I’d do something like that again in a heartbeat.

ANALOG is a super catchy band at all times so I had no lack of material to choose from! Since it’s an anniversary year however, I thought I’d delve into their back catalogue a bit. Also I wanted a simple, fun, catchy number to close out this round of covers. I upped the BPM a little to make it feel like some kind of Kirby racing level. I didn’t go too crazy with the sounds this time, wanting to keep it to some standard and recognisable voices; ANALOG’s sound is all about melody, and their synth patches are huge and arresting enough that if I pushed the sounds too much on this, it wouldn’t be so much a 16 bit covers as it would be just a regular cover of the song. I think it’s ended up sounding pretty fun and it makes for a driving closing track.

So that’s it for the first round of 16 BIT SESSIONS!

I have no idea who’s been listening or if anyone reads these, but if you HAVE been doing either of those things then thank you – I hope within these 11 weirdo covers you’ve found something to tap your foot to.

I’m still going to make 16 bit covers of local bands and hopefully with some regularity, but now that the Horseshoe show is upon us this Monday and we have a 2015 full of promise ahead of us, I really want to dive into the programming for our next original full-band release. I have an exciting idea for an album that I need to shake out of my head!

I’ll post the compilation (plus some bonus tracks) on Bandcamp in the next day or two! I have a huge list of bands I wanna cover but if you have any suggestions for bands for round 2, e-mail me at villainestmusic@gmail.com!