Altered Zones

If you've been reading Altered Zones since back in the day, you might recall that we once had a feature titled Zoned In. This feature confused people, partly because we never really made its premise very clear, and partly because the whole process was too overcomplicated and confusing to explain anyway. So, once we hit the end of the first cycle (seriously, don't ask), we took a hiatus, regrouped, and simplified.

Yes, today we're officially "rebooting" Zoned In, as a brand new series in which we feature "our favorite records in the world right now." Sure, we post about records we like, even love, every day. But once you fair-haired readers started picking your own faves with that Facebook "like" jam (and btw, thanks for all of that liking!), we figured you might find it useful to know our most liked records, too. So this is that: the first entry of the new and improved Zoned In...

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Games is the "futuristic production team" of lifelong friends Joel Ford of Tigercity and Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, and their debut EP, That We Can Play, earns the shit out of that "futuristic" tag. Even though this way-too-short record looks deep into the past for inspiration, to the kinds of hyper-obscure Europop 12-inches that were only released in places like Belgium on forgotten disco labels, the music Games spit back out sounds like it just returned from 2042 in a pimped-out Delorean. The thing about those old, rare 12-inches is that they barely existed in the first place. There's a ghostly quality to stumbling across turn-of-the-80s vinyl rips on YouTube at four in the morning, and it's that feeling, more than the music itself, that Games pay tribute to.

Armed to the teeth with a laundry list of period synths (as detailed in the incredible liner notes designed by the next-level multimedia artist Christian "Megazord" Oldham), Ford and Lopatin build their vintage pop feel, then coat it with a subtle glaze of post-modern effects. The result doesn't sound like those old dance tracks as much as it sounds like how we hear them now, decades later, through a soft-focused lens of romanticism. Even guest vocalist Lauren Halo (whose own music we recently profiled) sounds vaguely disembodied on the killer opening track "Strawberry Skies", like an ageless voice awakening from deep within a worn vinyl groove.

Games' That We Can Play also includes a few bonus re-imaginings of other works. One of them, "Shadows in Bloom" (which we co-premiered with our boy Gorilla vs Bear last month), puts up a fierce battle against "Strawberry Skies" for the title of Games' most replayable track yet, giving the Secret Service's 1981 Swedish pop hit "Flash in the Night" a 21st-century upgrade. They then do the exact opposite to CFCF's "It Was Never Meant To Be This Way", before Brooklyn-based Italo-horror-disco duo Gatekeeper brings things full-circle with their closing screw remix of "Strawberry Skies" sounding like a Dario Argento film score chopped up for the Streets of Rage 3 dancefloor stage.

That We Can Play LP is available in limited edition clear vinyl via Hippos In Tanks, also digitally from iTunes