This musician has a new album out...on floppy disk
Denis Karimani, better known as Remute, is a Hamburg-based music producer and techno artist. He has a new album out, called Limited, which is hardly surprising for a musician. But this one is a little different. Part of it is on vinyl, and the rest is on...floppy disk. That's right, the old 3.5" floppy disks that hold just 1.44 MB of data.
"In order to achieve this, I had to decrease the file sizes of the samples and work my way around the limitations," he explains. "I was really trying hard to shake off all the ballast and make techno tunes that are concentrated to the core of the sound." He says the average track is only about 200 kilobytes. "It's like the size of a huge email," Denis says.
So that's what the project is, but assuming you don't have an old Commodore 64 in the basement, how do you play it? "The easiest way is to buy a USB floppy drive off eBay," he says. "You can play back these tunes with freeware programs like OpenMPT or WinAmp...the golden WinAmp years," he says with a smile.
It's more fun to play it back on vintage computers...It's like working your way to the music- Remute
In fact, you can just download the album as an mp3 if you like. "But to be honest, it's more fun to play it back on vintage computers, because when you put some effort in playing back these tunes, it's kind of rewarding...it's like working your way to the music."
Listen to a snippet of the track "Son of a Blob" or play all the tracks from the album here.
As you might imagine, Denis has a long fascination with older technology like floppy disks. "I grew up with home computers, and I grew up with computer games, and the computer games from my generation, let's say, early 90s, were all on floppy disk," he explains. "It's my format of my youth. I grew up with this and I still use it today."
Denis sees the floppy disk format as a perfect match for techno. "It's a good format for music that really needs to sound like technology," he says.
As with any art form, constraints and limitations can be creativity's best friend. "I always tend to overload my tracks a little bit," he says. "And this is the first time I was forced to strip down every not necessary element. A kind of meditation, to make reduced music, but effective music.