Alexei Shulgin

Alexei Shulgin has taken an interesting approach to music with his so-called "cyberpunk rock band," 386 DX. One who might happen to wander into one of his shows would probably be pretty surprised by the experience. Alexei, armed with a computer keyboard connected to a 386 DX processor running MIDI software on Windows 3.1, would take the stage and perform computer generated MIDI replications of popular songs along with a visualization of the song projected onto the screen behind him.

Alexei's music sounds like a combination of old video game music paired with one of those text-to-speech programs. It is an interesting listening experience, but I can't imagine that many people would ever say "man, I could really rock out to some Alexei Shulgin." It seems that he takes a lighthearted approach to his performances, perhaps poking fun at the over-serious state of modern music. It is very cool that he does all this with a computer running on 4 Mb of RAM and 40Mb of hard drive space. Watching his performances should make us question our perspective of how we view music and what we consider music and, less specifically, art in general. It is interesting to note that in the video below, he is wearing a shirt that says "NOT AN ARTIST."


His work reminds of an artist that I enjoy listening to every once in a while called "8 Bit Weapon," which use a Commodore 64, Nintendo equipment, and some other simple synthesizers to make a really interesting combination of old video game sounds and modern music. While 8 bit weapon may use slightly more sophisticated equipment, they have created some really cool music. They have a few albums available for free download on their page that I linked to above, and also have a few songs available to stream on their myspace page.

What intrigues me most about these tpes of artists is that, while their "creations" may not be as accessible as more conventional standards of art and music, they show that it is definitely possible to break away from the norm and create something new and unique.






(http://www.easylife.org/386dx/386dx-in-2001.mpg if the embedded video won't play.)