Radio Discordia 027: MOON8 - 8-Bit Pink Floyd by Brad Smith

Have you ever wondered what Dark Side of the Moon would sound like if Pink Floyd had written it for NES, instead of for a rock band?

When videogame producer Brad Smith was a kid, he noticed something about his parents’ old vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon: The pulsing, looping, synthesized sounds of tunes like “On the Run” sounded like they’d come straight out of the videogames he was obsessed with. “It surprised me to hear something that sounded close to my games coming from my parents’ stereo”

Now Smith, 27, has put the finishing touches on MOON8, a cover version of the entire album created with instruments that mimic the sound hardware of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Smith’s offbeat riff on rock gospel belongs to the chiptune sub-genre of electronic music. Such songs are produced on the audio chips of retro electronics, or in software that emulates the old-school hardware.

Listen to MOON8 and you’ll feel the soul of the decades-old songs come alive through Smith’s machine-made sounds.

Side One
01 Speak to Me
02 Breathe
03 On the Run
04 Time
05 Breathe Reprise
06 The Great Gig in the Sky

Side Two
07 Money
08 Us And Them
09 Any Colour You Like
10 Brain Damage
11 Eclipse

MOON8 - by Brad Smith.mp3

rainwarrior@gmail.com

Huge thanks for Famitracker, which was used to sequence the whole thing. The sound was rendered with NSFplug. Final editing was done with Audacity. No expansion chips were used; this album works entirely within the limits of the standard North American NES.

Radio Discordia a Dissemination of www.discordiacultureshop.com