Last weekend I travelled through New York City for a wedding, a location I have only ventured through three times – on average, once every 12 years. So I have no roots in the city, little history, and despite having been there, virtually everything I “know” about it has been sucked up in childhood through pop culture such as Ghostbusters, The Critic, or The Muppets Take Manhattan. But I thought that the occasion would make for a fun opportunity to look at an old creative work we re-released last year, set in New York. The work is the song WALKER.MOD, titled “Stroll Thru New York” by Darren Grant of EuphoniX, first released on the last day of February 1993. (Where historical computer art is concerned, the easily-embeddable, instantly experienced visual artworks get the lion’s share of the social media love, and even Mistigris’ little-loved “lit” – easy to paste and explain – gets more airtime than our extensive and formidable music back stacks, so I’d like to try placing a stronger emphasis on vintage tracker music… because there’s a ton of it, and much of it is truly awesome!)
If Jovian and Tom were the core of EuphoniX, Jason and Darren were always its outliers – JaZz on the experimental, bruitist side, Darren on the sentimental, traditionalist side. That means that this tune is accessible, if extraordinary in the annals of computer music. Described internally as “humorous new age theme music”, it was released only a week after the composer’s similarly left-field Mystic Valour (also described as “new age” – a phrase that keeps being seen in the EuphoniX catalogue, but conspicuously only when applied to Darren’s songs.) You might get the feeling from JaZz’s anarchic tracks that he was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, but with Darren’s songs you can always be assured that they are precisely what they are intended to be, so any speed bumps listeners encounter will not be ones of composition or production, but rather mismatches of musical taste.
The instrument name messages don’t reveal much beyond the song’s release date, and pressing the onetime composer for further remarks two decades down the line didn’t result in much more: “Oh haha.. hmm not much. Mostly I raided other sample sets and played around. :) super cheese”.
As he sowed, so too do we reap: “super cheese” is the order of the day. The two minute and twenty-five second long song begins at a dawdling pace, like a record (let’s get you in the ‘80s mood here right off the bat) starting up midway through a song before the turntable reaches its cruising speed. The overall theme here is one of intrepid success to those who dare: in my mind’s eye, the opening of the song shows a businessman in a tailored suit emerging from a taxicab with his briefcase, quickly getting his bearings before power-walking – unhurried, but confident and in command – toward his destination: wealth and high finance. Within five seconds the song has achieved the pace it will enjoy for the rest of its duration, and its main theme rings out with a certain air of inevitability – as though somehow, the whole system of Wall Street was rigged. (But rigged in the businessman’s favour! No sour grapes in this song!)
As if to hammer itself home, it plays a neat trick with with the synth-horn lead line, at intervals re-triggering at phrase’s end the same sample at the same pitch with a louder intensity, like some record-setting Kenny G trick of circular breathing. This is all punctuated by a kickin’ slap bass line in the lower register, perhaps some inheritor of the New York sophistication of similarly New-York-set Seinfeld, launched in 1989.
There’s nothing particularly Big Apple about this song, which I like to think has its counterpart in Jovian’s Thursday Night in the City following in September of that year, a much more urban piece of work. For years, the image that comes to mind when I think of WALKER.MOD is actually the introduction to the short-lived cartoon Beverly Hills Teens, hitting the wrong coast but both fundamentally evoking a kind of fantasy of upper-class '80s white privilege where the future’s so bright, I gotta wear new wave sunglasses and a neon surf unitard.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu2eawfTiCM&w=420&h=315]
One minute in, the song dramatically slows down through an agonizing series of tempo gear shifts. Seventeen seconds later, our businessman finds that he has power-walked into the wrong side of the tracks – I believe in the '80s, The Bronx was the borough with that dangerous reputation. (Then again, as The Warriors demonstrated, even Central Park in the heart of Manhattan could be no cakewalk if you have the wrong enemies.) Whether Wall Street Kid is in any actual mortal peril or not is – as in The Bonfire of the Vanities – entirely beside the point, as from the sound of things he clearly sees himself at the mercy of a ruthless biker gang, one of whose members is likely spinning a chain menacingly. (No hint of “urban” music here, his boogeymen are plainly no b-boys.) But shortly thereafter, he hops a retaining wall or ducks out from under the right tunnel and emerges (at 1:34) into full sunshine in the business district again, with a transition back to the main theme as seamless as the departure from it was contrived. The anthem trumpets once more, then echoes its own return some 50 seconds later, and it wraps before risking overstaying its welcome.
In essence, this song is the sound of a bolt of totally awesome fabric my wife picked up at an estate sale last weekend.
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