welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will prepare you aesthetically for the era of techno-capitalist fascism. we’ll all be living in fear, under the thumbs of rich and powerful social media CEOs who built their empires on the backs of our personal data, but at least we’ll all look like Jones the dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic.
please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs. if you’re viewing this on the website, forgive the way Substack formats and spaces Bandcamp embeds.
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as we near the end of February, i wanted to let you all know that it’s been a really solid month for hexd.
ВЫРАСТАЮТ КРЫЛЬЯ (2019-2021)
this week, we’re starting with 16 tracks recorded by softcatfur between 2019 and 2021. the genre-bending release incorporates trance, synth, and ambient techno, but also nu-metal, metalcore, industrial, chiptune, and trap.
desert wander
777bit released Desert Wander via the recently established web label Net Positive Records, ran by Mae :3.
it’s a hexd narrative with no precise destination, guiding the listener through an aimless adventure (you could even say a wander), incorporating elements of chiptune, breakcore, and noise.
Mae :3 is also one half of a duo called wetcatsmell, which released this album, Blessed Be, on Dream Catalogue late last year.
in the past, Dream Catalogue was known as a prolific label with a focus on vaporwave, but in recent years it’s leaned more into dark ambient, dark synth, and general outsider electronic music.
galvanic corrosion
released by Misuzu-Chi de Devil on Argentinian label Easy Music, this EP packs in three tracks worth of hard hitting sextrance that had me yearning for a space to thrash in the middle of nowhere.
gamer music <3
an EP featuring hard trance remixes of game soundtracks, hyp3rg0r3’s gamer music <3, released on Vapor Scape Records, is exactly what it sounds like, and it does its job very well.
1337K0R3
YUNG FUDANSHI, alias of New York’s own YXKO, serves some truly leet tongue in cheek sextrance on 1337K0R3, beginning with a track called hex_on_the_beach.
a fan page
lombtv.neocities.org hosts a very simple fan page dedicated to the Pokémon Delibird. what you see in the screenshot below is mostly the extent of the website.
if you click on the image of Delibird, it cycles through three images. the learn more about Delibird link takes you to the Pokémon’s encyclopedia page on the popular fan site Serebii, but the real star is the Pokemon generator, which randomly generates a Pokémon sprite. i found the whole site incredibly charming.
game 6
an odd chess match, or an art piece? Game 6 is by a writer and artist who goes by BCA Belcastro, and who hosts a web presence on Neocities here. in Game 6, you don’t chose the moves—you just click the board. make sure to pay attention to the text on screen.
very specific digital nostalgia
in 2002, after the success of the English Yu-Gi-Oh! dub in the United States, McDonald’s and 4Kids teamed up to distribute one of three CD-ROMs with the now-defunct Might Kids Meal: one for Yugi, one for Kaiba, and one for Pegasus. each CD featured video, info about the series, the characters, and the card game, and music, including a song called One Card Short, a single from the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime soundtrack, Music to Duel By. if this all sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is, but it’s also a fascinating relic of the intersection of the digital and real—it’s aggressively of its time.
i was in the third grade when these were available, and i have an oddly vivid memory of going to a friend’s house and popping the CD into the disk drive of her family desktop’s tower, during an era of suburban computer rooms and Rollercoaster Tycoon, a year before the launch of MySpace.
if you’re interested, all three discs have been dumped on the Internet Archive here. FYI, they’re not compatible with MacOS.
void dive
₊‧.°.⋆🫧•˚₊‧𝕞𝟜𝕘𝕚𝕔𝟜𝕝𝔹𝟜𝕥ℍ₊‧.°.⋆🫧•˚₊‧ by jvlly
thank you for joining me. until next time.