The empty promises that the past made to us. Somewhere between the time I ordered this and the time it arrived, I must have felt the first inkling that CD-ROM multimedia wasn't going to be the future of music after all. Because when I found it just now, it was still in its sealed cellophane wrapping.
I've now broken the seal and inserted the CD into my iMac. The ReadMe.txt file says "Thanks for buying the original fuzzy groove. You're ahead." Oh, that would surely have made me feel very smug at the time — if I'd got as far as reading it. It goes on: "Maybe one day all music will look like this." Maybe it will, but the odds have lengthened a little in the ten years since this was written. "It's not a videogame, it's not a music CD, it's not MTV, it's not a music video." It's not an overnight chart sensation, either. "Music you can alter and enhance. Fuzzy groove. Pliable. Approximate. Leaving the linear."
Remarkably the CD-ROM actually worked. I played around with it for 5 minutes. I couldn't really tell what I was doing on the navigation — that was à la mode in 1996 — but I did once arrive at an interface where I could alter the BPM and patterns of different rhythm tracks and I could tweak a few loops. "The future of music?" Not in this house.
I found this Japanese web page and this American one about the CD-ROM, but all the official ones seem to have disappeared. Read Dan Hill on how "it's ever clearer — frankly it was at the time — that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at 'new media experiences'."
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