99Letters Has Two New EPs: Rosetta And Turbo Drum

Video game noises are no longer just a novelty, a cheap sonic trick used to evoke a decade long gone. Despite several hard drives worth of shitty chiptune music floating across the Internet in 2013, the last few years has seen 8-bit bloops legitimized, to some degree. Crystal Castles cop moves from the Silent Hill soundtrack and can be really popular. Anamanaguchi can anchor their entire sound on NES cartridges and still make an album that gets them invites to big music festivals. EDM, which includes everyone from Skrillex to DeadMau5 to who knows else, makes heavy use of video game noises AND imagery.

99Letters, out in Osaka, started his career dealing almost exclusively in blips and bloops. He was just way better at it than most, creating crushing compositions that were even more intimidating than anything Crystal Castles could put together. Yet now, it looks like the young producer is shying a bit away from his console-loving beginnings. He has two new EPs…Rosetta, out now, and Turbo Drum, out in September…which find him pushing his sound into more straightforward club sounds. And it sounds good! Rosetta opens with a bit of a plodding title track, but it gets going with the second song “Analog Location.” It’s a song that burbles and glows, a mix of bright synths and more aggressive sounds kept to the side. Even better is “Catch Me,” which revolves around a bit of a shattered vocal sample and at times feels like it is going to dissolve completely.

Turbo Drum, meanwhile, sounds like bone-rattling techno music, bringing to mind 99Letter’s early material, but switched over to something without Game Boy influences. It, more than anything else, signals the potential his new turn has. Get both on iTunes.