satellite cult 28.28

pixelated gore, HEXANGEL, neocities sites, DOS in browser

May 19, 2023

welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will dip you in a vat of some silvery, plasmatic substance and let it coat you until you’re cleansed. then, the great mechanical arms of the cyberlord will lift you out and cradle you for a moment before wringing you dry, allowing all the venom trapped in your heart to exit through your skin and drip down to the floor of the humanoid processing facility where you were taken after the revolution.

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 some Bandcamp embeds.

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Start

on Start, 9966 presents four tracks composed almost entirely using system sounds plundered from Windows XP and Windows 95, delivering lo-fi IDM that cools and energizes all at once.

pixelated gore

ten tracks of breakcore and chiptune inspired noise, this hardvapour release by rosary gore, out now on Net Positive Records, is pounding and pleasantly violent. it goes far beyond your standard hardcore—each track is skillfully layered, guiding your descent step by step into a techno dungeon you know you can’t crawl your way out of.

333

a split album by May :3 and Shima33, 333, released on Seaside Bliss, is hexd mayhem, sometimes giving us hardcore (almost sextrance), sometimes post-vaporwave, all with a shiny y2k Sanriocore aesthetic and a shitposting ethos.

HEXANGEL

this ambient hexd album by psiangel gently demands the listener’s attention with subtle chopping, soft drone, and trade offs between trap and breakbeats. HEXANGEL is sweet nuance, the act of emerging from a wrong thing and moving into a right one.

NEW SPEED ULTRA HIGHWAY ULTIMATE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE

these dark, even industrial tracks by New Beginnings Co™ hang on the edge of eccojams and broken transmission, incorporating chopping and ambient noise into a sound collage that keeps you wondering what will come next.

obscura

this album by blushʕ ꈍᴥꈍʔ features sweeping ambient sextrance that calms and settles just as much as it focuses and drives. there’s something fresh about it, like tracking the progression of 3D game graphics.

into-the-cyberscape

ponsbey’s 30-track album is so expansive that if you buy it on CD, you need to purchase two different disks. sextrance-adjacent, it leans into dreamcore, a microgenre denoting dreamy breakcore. and it is dreamy and liminal, at some junctures even leaning into industrial vaporwave. also featuring five guest artists, it’s sure to mesmerize.

DPaint

js-dos is an API that allows DOS software to run in-browser, and at dpaint.org, you can use DPaint II (or Deluxe Paint II), the 1988 port of the Amiga-native bitmap graphics editor.

neocities sites

at awoo.neocities.org, last updated three years ago, you’ll find a brief introduction to the site’s anonymous owner, a link to the OoCities.org archive of the Geocities Sunset Strip neighborhood, and the words “UNBLOCK ME BITTCH,” linking to that YouTube video of Joji performing a set for Boiler Room in 2017.

you can also check out frogtown.neocities.org. the frog says it’s going jump in a lake tomorrow, but will tomorrow ever come? the answer remains to be seen.

if you’re looking for something a little more human, i’d recommend checking out softwareangel.neocities.org. Angel’s website is warm and homey with a classic Windows design, and her passion for retro tech shines through everything.