In David Bischoff’s ‘Copyright Infringement’, a video games pirate confronts the ultimate digital rights management system: he gets sucked into the world of the game he was trying to access illegally- unlucky for him this was a digital adaptation of The Blob, and acid dissolution ensues.

Remember kids, Home Taping kills people.

Your 20jazzfunkgreats truly know for a fact that this so-called story is but a synthesis of many a folk tale about the legendary ‘Digital Frights Management’ system that MAFIAA clad IT nerds talk about in the small hours, after the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons session is over, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, mountains of polyhedral dice and glasses of flat coke. We know this because we have been there.

The stories go a little bit like this.

“At the beginning of the 1980s, Konami releases in the Korean market were suffering from high rates of piracy so the suits implemented the DFM system in the Korean edition of Castlevania. Within a week of release, around 120 kids had been found dead in their bedrooms and basement cellars. They were sucked dry, disembowelled, and worse. The response from the authorities was a total whitewash. They blamed the deaths on a youth cult under the nefarious influence of these ghastly video games, and Castlevania was banned for public health reasons. They buried a few thousands copies in the demilitarised zone close to the North Korean frontier. I managed to get hold of one through an Otaku forum, and gave it a go in my trusty Famicon.

It was totally awesome!

The LAZΣ- Run into Space (Bronnt Industries Kapital remix)

In Umdeutung Continuumb, a bunch of fearless seers recount their explorations of the opulent Kandarian citadel which is The LAZΣ’s Space Time Fabric Conditioner.

Bronnt Industries Kapital’s remix of Run into Space is one of the choice cuts, a thrilling play-through the dusty labyrinths of Dracula’s castle, where every beat is a leap over the black chasm between crumbling platforms, and analogue gothic melodies zoetrope into existence like spectral sprites. Levels of frozen epic are negotiated and foes from the netherworld vanquished as our agile witch-hunter strides forward with the obstinate purity of the classics, collecting an arsenal of silver relics for his eventual confrontation against the Master of Darkness.

“V. Sprake is the boogieman that survival horror developers use to scare their children off when they don’t behave. Not only was he the uncredited level designer of some of the classics of the genre, but also one of the five most powerful wizards in London. When Infogrames canned his ‘Psychical’ project halfway through, he vanished from the scene, taking all the masters with him. From time to time, you hear some dude talk about how he met some dude who knew someone who had played the demo for Psychical, and went insane. They say that Sprake has implemented the DFM into this demo not because he wants to discourage pirates, but because he wants those who play the game to be sucked into its world, experience it the way it should be experienced. Perhaps die.

It gives me the heebie jeebies.

As Stephen King would put it, ‘The terror just mounts and mounts’ in Ensemble Economique’s ‘Psychical’ album, out in Not Not Fun. These aren’t cheap thrills, latex masks and blood splatter, but blurry snapshots from La Fin Absolute Du Monde, dirgey effluvia that seep from the indistinct shadows projected by unspeakable acts.

Shacks Built out of Plyboard is a spiralling descent into a forlorn basement whose brick walls are covered with cryptic Arcana. On the dusty floor, amongst blotches of brutally oxidised red lay two dice made of human bone, revealing the symbols of the Stag and the Kissing Twins.

It is a corrupt bop animated by the same chaotic dread vibe that animates Riz Ortolani’s soundtrack for Cannibal Holocaust, Goblin’s Witch or Ennio Morricone’s Crime and Dissonance. It is the real deal, like that.

Ensemble Economique- Shacks Built out of Plyboard