Dutch Argument (turned on) (instrumental)

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Dutch Argument (turned on) (instrumental)
by on (#161858)
What happens when you try to squeeze five tracks into the NES's three channels?

  1. half the drum
  2. drone bass
  3. rhythmic bass
  4. melody
  5. high pitched countermelody

You get the aural equivalent of sprite flicker. I made this last weekend as a test case for some features of Pently and got some people in #nesdev to listen to it.

NES remake: Pently source | nsf | ogg

(You can hear the polyphony fail around 2:24-2:40.)

I composed the original version of this piece in ModPlug Tracker in mid-2001. It marked the beginning of a tendency toward 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures in my work.

Original (instrumental): s3m | ogg

It was originally intended to be the backing track for what All The Tropes would come to call a "stupid statement dance mix" (think "Batdance" or "Picard Song" or "Cillit Cillit Cillit Bang" or "Betes Betes Diabetes"). It sampled a 1993 half-hour TV documentary about Jewish people in the Netherlands, making fun of certain Dutch phrases that sounded funny to my English-speaking mind. For example, onderdak ("shelter") sounds like "Shoeshine Boy", and a Dutch sentence meaning "We have very separate roles" (referring to men and women) sounds vaguely like "heaven, hell, and Portugal". In fact, it was from this documentary that I learned the term "discriminazi" which I occasionally use on Slashdot to describe someone acting out of prejudice. That one arose from my mishearing of Dutch discriminatie ("discrimination"), where final -tie is pronounced "tsee". But I stripped out the samples when I realized what a good job the studio had done of keeping the documentary off the usual above-board streaming sites.

Original (vocal): Catch me in #nesdev