There are few truly unique musical artists, but the music made by Italy’s Master Boot Record arguably exists in a category of its own. Today, the band announces their eighth full-length album, “Personal Computer”, and the brand-new single “80486DX”.
Helmed solely by technologist/songwriter Victor Love, Master Boot Record is, if anything, creatively prolific. The follow-up to “Floppy Disk Overdrive” (2020), “Personal Computer” is Love’s latest offering since emerging as an 8-bit ghost from the bulletin board system (BBS) scene in 2016. Now, he’s returned to right-click on devotees with yet another easter egg and symbolism-rich mélange of intensely ornate yet driving digital orchestrations. Just don’t call “Personal Computer” synthwave, or whatever new-fangled term is being used to describe Master Boot Record masterful video game-like scoring.
To put it simply: this is metal done with a synth.
“The main elements include chiptune, demoscene & video game music, thrash/death metal and some black metal as well as classical and symphonic patterns and progressive structures. But everything is programmed and done with synthesizers.”
The result, influenced as much by classical baroque music, bay area thrash metal, and Commodore 64 games, is a frenzied mashup of what logic suggests should be disparate sounds, but in the hands of MBR make sense, taking the listener in unexpected and always thrilling directions, smashing through genre walls.
