With Doo Rag dormant, and with his collaborator Bob Log set to release a new album, Malling has found a new area of sound to mine. It consists of something that's managed to weave its way into the psychic vein of most of us who experienced growing up in the Eighties. It's Eighties music, but not the stuff that was on the radio.
It is, as Malling describes it, "the soundtrack to my ill-spent youth, hanging out in arcades in Phoenix." His new project is called COiN, and its music is comprised almost entirely of video game sounds. You know, the repetitive sub-analog synth music that played while you killed everything, ate everything or saved the world. Something about this music, lovingly created by closet composers bound by finite space and infinite code, struck a chord with Malling.
"That's what's amazing about video-game music in general," explains Malling from his Tucson home. "A game would be written -- the graphics and the interface and everything would be designed -- and they would leave very little memory for the soundtrack. So these programmers, these hacker-type musicians, would have to go in, note for note, in Basic and program it that way. One hundred percent code."
COiN was born when Malling was helping a friend promote his novel. Trying to find a variation on the books-on-tape theme, Malling was going to read the novel through Apple's Text to Speech extension. "I thought it would be cool, but it was really boring," he says. Although that project didn't jell, Malling saw potential in the voice simulator. "At the same time, I was messing around with these video-game sounds," he says, "so I just married them."
Most of COiN's music was captured from an arcade simulator called MACMAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) that features vintage arcade games in their native states. He also transferred data from a Commodore 64 into a contemporary Apple machine via a nebulous process. The game scores were then fitted into song, augmented with a computer-generated voice and live organic drums. The Apple OS provided the speech capabilities and the female voice is, uh, strangely alluring. Despite its techno-retro origins, COiN is not a trip down memory lane. It's rock 'n' roll that just happens to utilize a palette of video-game sounds.
To prove that the music genuinely rocks -- and doing so in naughty-little-boy fashion -- COiN has the computer-generated voices speaking dirty lyrics. More than one song on COiN's self-released CD Attract Mode have overt sexual content. Hearing a computer intone lyrics about a "laundrymat [sic] b.j.," with the music beeping and blipping and the drums filling in the gaps, is an absurdly entertaining experience.
Beyond the nudge-wink sentiment of the crude lyrics, there is also a strange robot-love vibe happening on Attract Mode, which makes seemingly innocuous computer jargon come off like some sort of sex talk. "Permission to establish the interface?/Establish the interface" sounds like it could be Hal making the moves on a gal 2000, while the lyrics "Let's discuss the next level" have adult-flavored meaning when framed in the context of the more explicit material.
In a world where music is increasingly more bland than the commercials that bookend it, Malling and his creations seemingly come from outer space. COiN is a million miles removed from the prepackaged, preplanned Eighties renaissance being foisted on the musically retarded. New bands like the Rentals and older ones like Blondie currently cashing in on the Eighties resurgence miss the subconscious nostalgia trigger that COiN pulls so easily. COiN plays music that we didn't know we liked, that we just passively allowed in, while plunking down allowances to play something that couldn't be beaten. COiN is not rehashing, or pandering to fashion's fickle temperament, it's reshaping a forgotten form of musical expression.
Citing disparate sources of inspiration such as electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, children's educational toy Speak & Spell, Japanese noise-savant Cornelius and the Commodore 64, Malling says the project may, in some strange way, be anticipating the future of music. "Sometimes you have to step into the future. We're kind of taking one step forward and five steps back," says Malling.
Malling frequently identifies the Commodore 64 as perhaps the most significant influence in shaping COiN. A long-obsolete early-Eighties home computer, the machine holds a special place in Malling's heart. "The Commodore 64 was really the first affordable computer that could do anything," claims Malling. "It supported Midi right out of the box. It didn't have an OS, but you could still do sound with it, and you could use it as a Midi controller for a couple of hundred bucks. That's why a lot of musicians had it. It [Commodore 64's programming system] was all based on math and sine wave. You would have to program, you would have to tell the machine, for example, how long to hold a note and what note to hold. If you want to put in vibrato, what is the rate of the vibrato, every note. I was able to sample all the sounds."
While a solid amount of cut-and-paste manipulation occurred in Malling's home studio, he is quick to defend the computer hackers of old and their songsmithing. "A lot of the arrangements are songs. They just don't have lyrics," says Malling. "They don't have lyrics and big beats, so we just kinda nipped and tucked and made actual songs."
All this technology, old and new, might not seem like the warmest music to view live. Not so, claims Malling. To solve the no-singer problem, COiN has secured the services of a mysterious female vocalist known only as "Walter." The two are rumored to have met in a Laundromat in Europe where they found that they shared similar interests musically and otherwise (it's not known whether "Walter" and her Laundromat are the inspiration for the aforementioned COiN song). Comprising the live version of COiN, "Walter" sings lyrics while Malling bangs away on organic drums. A huge network of Commodore 64s and an Apple server provide the high-tech karaoke music. "It's kind of like the opposite of a band playing with a drum machine," explains Malling. "We have a chick that fronts the band that rocks, and I'm pounding the fuck out of drums. We're not a techno ambient band; we're not meandering. We have songs that have parts and they end and start. We're just taping sounds that are going to be vaguely familiar."
Although COiN is an unknown live commodity, the record speaks for itself. Never degenerating into shtick, Attract Mode is truly unlike anything else out there, and that's saying something in today's oversaturated music market. The disc (available at COiN's Web site www.buyersphere.com) is the ultimate form of fun for twisted adults who long to hear the electronic symphony of their youth.
And what does the future hold for this electronic flower in the desert? Malling says the group's plans include recording a Christmas album that will be ready for the upcoming holiday season. After that, the group will make its mark metal-style with -- appropriately enough -- a note-for-note COiN-style rendering of Metallica's Kill 'em All.
COiN is scheduled to perform on Friday, September 24, at the Green Room in Tempe, opening for Les Payne Product. Red Shifter, and the Penny Drops are also scheduled to perform.