Jupiter-C – Football Game OST
Fresh from their knock-out 12” on Invada, dark electro-pop project Jupiter-C return to Ramber, home of their equally excellent and long-sold-out AA cassingle “The Process”/“Locust”, for an altogether different proposition. Football Game is an old-school, point-and-click PC computer game newly out via Cloak & Dagger and inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. With plenty of the genre’s usual puzzles and dialogue interactions across its hour-long game-play, it focuses on Tommy, a local high-school football hero, and his quest to find his missing girlfriend.
The year might be 1987, but Ashiya Eastwood and David Kane (the Manchester/Liverpool duo now based in London tasked with the game’s audio) have their sights on the industrial revolution instead. The oppressive hum of machinery consequently pollutes their soundtrack throughout, cold chimes, metallic beats and a punishing snare programme the cold counterpoint on opening track “Forever” to MIDI strings, Gregorian-style chant and Ashiya’s subtly menacing vocal, which echoes out across the eerily dead battlefield like a ghost. The same creeping sense of dread returns on “Hold Me”, deep bass and rumbling percussion needling in on the pressure points of darkwave, the vocal this time a glacial frosting to tormented guitars and hypnotic electro oscillations.
Sandwiched in between comes “Grind 4 Death”, a collaboration with anonymous artist F0RM and, with him on distorted vocal stem, it perhaps unsurprisingly sounds quite unlike anything Jupiter-C have done before. A pixelated post-punk banger with steam-driven compression and thudding 4/4 beat, it reverberates quite unsettlingly like a ruler being twanged over and over on the edge of a desk. On the B-side we encounter one- to two-minute game-cuts: buzzed-out blasts of irradiated noise, heavy chimes and gentle pulses, post-apocalyptic drones, atmospheric ambience and otherworldly effects like aliens sharpening knives. Angelo Badalamenti it may not be but, as a score, it’s more than mysterious, confusing and downright noir enough to please even the great man himself.
Best track: “Forever”
~The Football Game Soundtrack will be released April 6th on Ramber Records. Each copy comes with a download code for the audio and a download key to grab a copy of the game too Download the game only here.~