Square Wave Memories (César Astudillo)

It's been many years since I announced on the Blog the creation of a compilation CD of César Astudillo 's melodies, better known as Gominolas . César was the main musician for the Spanish company Topo Soft, and his melodies could be heard on the main 8-bit computers of the time: ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and, of course, MSX.

My idea at the time was to release the album to delight César's music fans, myself included. It didn't work out and never materialized beyond a homemade demo I made to show at the 36th MSX RU in Barcelona. The CD was originally going to contain 21 tracks, but that number later increased to 24:

Cray5 (Amstrad CPC)
Triple Commando (ZX Spectrum)
AleHop!
Black Beard
Chicago's 30
Coliseum
Colt 36
Desperado
Drazen Petrovich Basket
The Lost World
Mad Mix Game
Metropolis
Perico Delgado Yellow Jersey
Rock'n Roller
Score 3020
Silent Shadow
Stardust
Survivor
Temptations
Titanic
Tuareg
Wells & Fargo
Whopper Chase
Invasion of the Zombie Monsters

And not only that, but my intention was to go a step further and invite musical artists to create versions of these tunes. Unfortunately, this idea wasn't very successful and only materialized in WYZ 's versions of Silent Shadow with SCC sound and Wells & Fargo .

Many people helped me make the project a reality. I'm grateful to all of them for their willingness and encouragement throughout the process. It's a shame the CD never saw the light of day.

So, since so much time has passed , it's time to share with you all the text written by César himself in 2009:

SQUARE WAVE MEMORIES

These melodies were first heard twenty years ago, and yet there are still people who hear them.
remember. This flatters me and makes me feel grateful, but the truth is that more than anything I
It's surprising. I even have a psychological theory about it: I call it "the coincidence of an improbable name and an expectant attitude." I should write a paper about it someday, and everything.
Let me explain: My hypothesis is that when these melodies were played, they usually did so
accompanied by two other elements. The first was a feeling of expectation. It ended a
tedious wait accompanied by a rigorous ritual (ah, those taps on the cassette to relieve the
tape tensions, those adjustments to the azimuth screw to get the best treble), and finally you could play. In other words, music was, essentially, the long-awaited messenger of good news. The second was the on-screen presence of a slightly odd name: Gominolas, the musical alias given to me by Pedro Oteo, the brilliant bassist of the first band I played keyboards in (when he called me “Gominolas,” that funny Pedro was referring to my ears). Possibly, along with Dinamic's “Snatcho,” this pseudonym was one of the most extravagant names that used to appear in the credits of Spanish games of that time.

Needless to say, music itself also made its contribution. The power of music is astonishing.
evocative that music has. Any music. There are pieces that stick in your head
experiences of an era: after many years, you hear some melodies and it's like pulling the
ball of memory… to the beat of the notes a thousand faces, places, flavors, are revealed,
disappointments and illusions that you didn't remember were there, like a postcard or a dry leaf that
unexpectedly detaches itself from between the pages of a dusty book and falls in front of us.
My case reminds me of that piece of paper where I had painted the keyboard of a piano and the
hexadecimal numbers that corresponded to each note, or the difficult-to-define pleasure that comes with
hearing for the first time on a speaker what a moment ago was only in your head, or the illusion
with which he took the subway, with a three-inch record in his pocket, on his way to that basement of
Agustín de Foxá, inhabited by those guys as eccentric as they were full of talent, who gave me the gift of showing me their half-baked magic, and on top of that, they gave me a check. For others, they will be others
different memories… In this sense, fortune has given me the opportunity to sneak into memory
of many people, hidden in the Trojan horse of video games.

On one occasion, analyzing the phenomenon of apparently trivial communications in the networks of
microblogging, I said that human brains are addicted to leaving references of ourselves in others
brains. We tweet that we are drinking a delicious orange juice, because few things
like it more than imagining others imagining us drinking that orange juice. It's
normal: people who manage to be remembered always have more places to lean on. In the
The more you get people to remember you, the more real you become.

That's why I'm so grateful to Konamito, and to you who took the trouble to get this compilation in
whose workmanship is so lovingly invested. And I say to you: Thank you for remembering. I will remember you too.

César Astudillo, November 2009.