Are we living in the past here or taking regular day trips?

[Commie_User]

We've got Commodore 64s and we love them. They produce good sounds and host products even emulators can't exploit. (MIDI or the Sound Expander, say.) As part of our home studios they're fantastic. (And that's not to mention my going mad with the NES recently.) Working nostalgia there and I hope I'll expire before the C64 gear and media does.

We have them work alongside, but not instead of, modern home recording equipment. We often re-visit old game themes. But is it possible that many of us aren't trying hard enough to embrace more contemporary ways of making music as a result? The umpteenth re-working of the same classic game tunes is all well and good but what about covering something by the likes of Amy Winehouse? A bit of it arranged for the Commodore, bit on a smooth modern keyboard, drums thrown in and you've got something fresh. (And would it hurt to have a few rock covers of C64 tunes sometimes?)



Inventiveness...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to bash people who come to this site for fun. Especially as I doubt I could record proper music or render the kind of pictures I see here. (Mind, I do try. I attempt to use as many 'real' instruments as possible, alongside keyboards and the Commies, as well as take inspiration from dreams or old records everyone else seems to have forgotten about.) But even I sometimes wonder if this nostalgia for the old days could stifle as much as inspire.


_________________________________________


But what if we could go back in time? That would be fantastic I think. But risky. Though if I could then anyone could, and that would knacker causality.

Might be nice to pop back to the '80s and enjoy so much we only saw as kids the first time around. But unless you've got a political agenda and fancy being a bit of a 'prophet', you wouldn't want to leave the present behind for a life in the past. And there'd be too many people abusing the past by going back with modern inventions, claiming they invented them. Most would be rumbled but you'd still get the undeserving making the successes - with perhaps no idea of following up the technology they would have stolen.

And what about money? Far from capsizing the past's economy with too many unauthorised new notes initially, we would have far too few opportunities for spending. Even after 25 years, the money's changed. Though we still have Pounds, the coin and note designs aren't the same and you'd struggle to find enough pennies with dates old enough to take with you. People might then resort to stealing or having to take two jobs on split shifts - one for now and the other one in 1984. (And then we may give ourselves crashing depressions in both eras as money is moved about across the times. Might even have to have a time travel stock exchange, with the top brains twinning up with themselves from the past to handle the fiscal ructions.)

And then what about people creating a housing shortage by having two families in different eras?

Then there's antiques and collectables. Who knows what would be an original and what wouldn't? OK having more original magazines, with publishers and journalists making more money having more copies sell for the coffee tables of 2011, but what about plates and furniture? Take a new cabinet back to the 80s and hide it, come back to 2011 to retrieve it. Then go back again and again with it until it ages. The bottom would fall out of the antiques industry, not to mention the cabinet.

So what do we all think then?

[LMan]

Those are excellent ways for making a quick buck. Where's that time machine again?

On a more serious note, nostalgia is nice sometimes but it's unhealthy to be caught up in it. Remixing old tunes goes both ways, to the past and the future. That's the wonderful thing about this community.

[Chris Abbott]

I like the way the original music made me feel young again, and doing remixes was a great way of reliving that validly, preserving it, and learning musical skills at the same time. I'd never really want to go back to an era with only four terrestrial TV channels, and where a clunky old disk drive cost £700

Most of my life, in common with all fathers, I think, is lived in the present: both in dealing with the children, and creating new memories for them to reminisce about when they're older, and in working hard to provide for their future. None of that leaves much time or room for excessive retro navalgazing

I think one of the most valuable things about Remix64 is that it reassures us that our particular brand of nostalgic is not nuts: or if it is, a valid kind of nuts. Hazelnuts, rather than peanuts, I think.

Chris

[Vosla]

I guess I would try to tell my younger self what bad choices I made in life. So I would have chosen another path, avoiding some grave errors and just end up as just another kind of asshole I am right now.

In reality, the magic has just gone. It's surely not the physical presence of a C64 that turns me on. It's the fond memories. Memories of playing M.U.L.E. with my best and long gone friends. Or maybe fondling that girl who loved Supercycle so much.