quête:datta

Die 1969 in München gegründete Band Embryo (feat. Mishra) verbindet auf diesem Album Krautrock, Jazz, freie Improvisation sowie europäische und indische Musikelemente. Seit 2015 wird das Kollektiv von Marja Burchard weitergeführt. Die Aufnahmen entstanden 2023 im Minga Records Studio in München und dokumentieren die langjährige Zusammenarbeit mit den indischen Musikern Deobrat Mishra (Sitar, Gesang) und Prashant Mishra (Tabla). Ergänzt wird das Album durch Gastbeiträge von Niko Schabel, Dr. Chandreyee Maitra und Dattatreya Desai. Die Besetzung umfasst Marja Burchard (Vibraphon), Maasl Maier (Bass, Flöte), Jakob Thun (Schlagzeug) sowie Deobrat und Prashant Mishra.

Back in the 1990s video games were still largely seen as nerdy: fun, sure, but basically a guilty pleasure that you’d soon grow out of. The release in 1995 of wipE'out'', a lightning-fast, razor-sharp, futuristic racing game that helped to launch the PlayStation in Europe and North America, changed all that. This was a game that looked and sounded both adult and cool, the kind of game you would put on display in your living room, rather than hide away under your bed. Key to this was the fact that wipE'out'' borrowed unashamedly from the clubbing experience and electronic music, in a way that put it at the heart of progressive mid 90s culture. It soon became a phenomenon.

wipE'out'' looked sensational, with Sheffield agency The Designers Republic - known for their work with Warp - creating the visuals, packaging and manual for the game, drawing heavily on the bright colours and excitable geometric shapes of the rave and club flyers of the early 90s.

wipE'out'' also sounded like a new rave dream. The European version of the game included music from The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Orbital, the kind of fashionable game syncs that were almost unheard of at the time. Equally striking was the game’s original music, which came from Welsh musician Tim Wright, aka CoLD SToRAGE, by this point already a veteran in the video games world, having worked on the music for Amiga titles such as Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast 2. His music for wipE'out'' was, if anything, even more extreme than the big-name syncs, mixing the accelerated beats of drum & bass with the pure synth rush of trance to make music that sounded as breathlessly exciting as playing the game felt.

These tracks were burned into the brains of millions of gamers; the soundtrack to a generation of late-night anti-gravity racing, as the sun gingerly rose beyond the curtains. But they haven’t, perhaps, quite got the respect they deserve, something that this release will address. In 2023, video game music is finally getting its dues; here, remastered and repackaged –and also remixed by cutting edge producers such as Kode9, μ-Ziq, Brainwaltzera, Simo Cell, Wordcolour, James Shinra, Surgeons Girl and Dattassette– are some of the most important, thrilling, innovative and most fun songs ever committed to game release.