Warrior. Born in County Durham and residing in Sheffield, MarcusMIDI composes all of his songs using old video-game console chips to emulate various notes and sounds that would be familiar to anyone playing an Atari or ZX Spectrum back in the 80’s. Where most sensible artists would be happy using a synth, MarcusMIDI prefers the cold clipped urgency of the 8-bit sound to give him something colourful to play with. Like Sonic the Hedgehog and Knuckles sharing a few beers with The Strokes. All the melodies are composed using old videogame chips that were used in the 70 and 80s to makes game scores. So there’s a really cold raw DIY sound which is blended with late 70s GBGBs era sounding guitars.
This sound is polished off with distinctive crooning and conversational vocals that cover anything and everything from love, life, loss and depression. The result? The sound of the future made from bits of the past.
A project that started in his bedroom, ‘Title Screen’ is the first part of 3 tracks recorded at Big Jelly Studios in Margate UK with long-term producer and friend, Mike Collins. Recorded in a few hours both fusing analogue and digital, ‘Title Screen’ branches out in to a more trap/hip-hop, or ‘chip-hop’ sound which is a niche within a niche and becoming increasingly popular online.
Essentially, after losing his Velvet Underground box-set Marcus found himself listening to far too much Drake, Lil Peep and Lil Xan. Marcus takes the listener on a retro journey sonically. Lyrically, amongst the duelling between guitar and chip-tune hooks, MarcusMIDI grabs you by the hand and confide in you for the night. So far he has picked up a few fans of his work along the way, namely Suede’s Brett Anderson, Jamie Reynolds (Klaxons) and Dave Rowntree (Blur) to name but a few.
