Hardwarez

Description

Hardwarez, the third LP by MASTER BOOT RECORD (aka MBR) on Metal Blade, sees multi-instrumentalist mastermind Vittorio D'Amore (aka Victor Love) aurally exploring the duality of technology and humanity in 9 intense and incandescent tracks. The LP, which follows 2022's Personal Computer and 2020's Floppy Disk Overdrive, comes from the expansive mind of Love, an Italian producer who emerged from the underground as an anonymous project in 2016 to create the soundtrack for the cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game VirtuaVerse. The project seamlessly evolved into a standalone entity, releasing over 14 albums in just a few years.

To create Hardwarez, the technologist worked by live streaming his desktop on YouTube while composing new music. Everything is programmed via MIDI. "The very first song I wrote is actually also the first single, "CPU," he says. "Even though the other songs on the album have a quite different style, the type of riffing and the different melodic section of this track worked as a base to upgrade the sound before moving forward." "CPU" is also where Love decided to test the real guitar overdubs and was inspired by the results.

"With every album I've upgraded bits of the sounds, adding new layers," he says. "In Hardwarez the core sounds for synth guitars, leads and pads are still those that constitute the trademark MBR sound, but what makes this album very different is the addition of guitar overdubs that play along synth guitars for both the rhythmic and solo sections."

Intensive touring augmented with live musicians helped Love to make the decision to include real guitars to achieve a massive sound and boost the enhanced frequency spectrum of the instrument. "On this record there are a lot of heavy riffs with palm muting and my lead guitarist Shreddy recorded most of those leads and solos as well playing in unison with synth leads and adding extra energy to them."

The tracks also feature sections without overdubs and with updated drum samples and a new mixing approach, creating a more vibrant and punchy drum sound. "This time I decided to add only guitars to keep a balance with the electronic synthesized soul of the project," Love says, "but I won't exclude recording live drums on future albums."

"The concept of Hardwarez is by default the continuation of the concept of previous albums, which is about spreading the word about retro hardware and software," says Love, who grew taking piano lessons and listening to classical music before getting into thrash and death metal as a teen.

The album title merges the term "Hardware" with "warez," also known as The Scene, more commonly known as the scene of cracks and pirated software which has been influential to Love in terms of crack and keygen music. While Love also organically began listening to electronic music, acid techno, industrial and synth pop, he also grew up in the '90s through all the grunge, nu-metal and industrial scene.

Old-school metal as well as '80s and '90s movies and video games -- and music from these -- also play a role in Love's musical DNA. His years of music and computer fanaticism is all manifested in MASTER BOOT RECORD and Hardwarez. "What I'm doing with this album and to an extent with previous ones, is to mix the sounds of cracks, keygen, demoscene and video game-inspired chiptune with heavy metal and classical music using hardware and computers to produce it."

Additionally, Love explains, "Computers in general, old and new as well as hardware or software since 1986 until now, have been a huge influence on me and MBR. I grew up through all of it because my father had a computer shop in the early days. I've been dealing with all those manuals, learning how to make each of these new devices work, be it motherboards, graphic cards, mouses, scanners, CD-burners or webcams, you name it. I've seen it all in all possible variations."

Yet Love doesn't necessarily think that everything old school is necessarily better. MBR's music is produced through the most advanced technologies in audio production while the concept at its basis is to limit the framework to a specific set of sounds. The goal and result boosts creativity and define the sound of the project. Live, that duality continues. Cutting-edge tech is used next to a Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 that Love uses onstage to play some parts live. MBR utilize video projections, but also bring CRT monitors, preferring cathode TV's vibrancy to LCD monitors.

It's his penchant for non-stop creative and technological deep dives which informs Hardwarez' cover art as well, which indirectly expresses the album's theme. "With this album the 486DX-33MHz-64MB becomes sentient through human augmentation", Love says, concluding, "For we may become better humans with their help, but machines still need us to shine."

Description

Hardwarez, the third LP by MASTER BOOT RECORD (aka MBR) on Metal Blade, sees multi-instrumentalist mastermind Vittorio D'Amore (aka Victor Love) aurally exploring the duality of technology and humanity in 9 intense and incandescent tracks. The LP, which follows 2022's Personal Computer and 2020's Floppy Disk Overdrive, comes from the expansive mind of Love, an Italian producer who emerged from the underground as an anonymous project in 2016 to create the soundtrack for the cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game VirtuaVerse. The project seamlessly evolved into a standalone entity, releasing over 14 albums in just a few years.

To create Hardwarez, the technologist worked by live streaming his desktop on YouTube while composing new music. Everything is programmed via MIDI. "The very first song I wrote is actually also the first single, "CPU," he says. "Even though the other songs on the album have a quite different style, the type of riffing and the different melodic section of this track worked as a base to upgrade the sound before moving forward." "CPU" is also where Love decided to test the real guitar overdubs and was inspired by the results.

"With every album I've upgraded bits of the sounds, adding new layers," he says. "In Hardwarez the core sounds for synth guitars, leads and pads are still those that constitute the trademark MBR sound, but what makes this album very different is the addition of guitar overdubs that play along synth guitars for both the rhythmic and solo sections."

Intensive touring augmented with live musicians helped Love to make the decision to include real guitars to achieve a massive sound and boost the enhanced frequency spectrum of the instrument. "On this record there are a lot of heavy riffs with palm muting and my lead guitarist Shreddy recorded most of those leads and solos as well playing in unison with synth leads and adding extra energy to them."

The tracks also feature sections without overdubs and with updated drum samples and a new mixing approach, creating a more vibrant and punchy drum sound. "This time I decided to add only guitars to keep a balance with the electronic synthesized soul of the project," Love says, "but I won't exclude recording live drums on future albums."

"The concept of Hardwarez is by default the continuation of the concept of previous albums, which is about spreading the word about retro hardware and software," says Love, who grew taking piano lessons and listening to classical music before getting into thrash and death metal as a teen.

The album title merges the term "Hardware" with "warez," also known as The Scene, more commonly known as the scene of cracks and pirated software which has been influential to Love in terms of crack and keygen music. While Love also organically began listening to electronic music, acid techno, industrial and synth pop, he also grew up in the '90s through all the grunge, nu-metal and industrial scene.

Old-school metal as well as '80s and '90s movies and video games -- and music from these -- also play a role in Love's musical DNA. His years of music and computer fanaticism is all manifested in MASTER BOOT RECORD and Hardwarez. "What I'm doing with this album and to an extent with previous ones, is to mix the sounds of cracks, keygen, demoscene and video game-inspired chiptune with heavy metal and classical music using hardware and computers to produce it."

Additionally, Love explains, "Computers in general, old and new as well as hardware or software since 1986 until now, have been a huge influence on me and MBR. I grew up through all of it because my father had a computer shop in the early days. I've been dealing with all those manuals, learning how to make each of these new devices work, be it motherboards, graphic cards, mouses, scanners, CD-burners or webcams, you name it. I've seen it all in all possible variations."

Yet Love doesn't necessarily think that everything old school is necessarily better. MBR's music is produced through the most advanced technologies in audio production while the concept at its basis is to limit the framework to a specific set of sounds. The goal and result boosts creativity and define the sound of the project. Live, that duality continues. Cutting-edge tech is used next to a Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 that Love uses onstage to play some parts live. MBR utilize video projections, but also bring CRT monitors, preferring cathode TV's vibrancy to LCD monitors.

It's his penchant for non-stop creative and technological deep dives which informs Hardwarez' cover art as well, which indirectly expresses the album's theme. "With this album the 486DX-33MHz-64MB becomes sentient through human augmentation", Love says, concluding, "For we may become better humans with their help, but machines still need us to shine."