Strangely enough, I can count among my earliest memories the buzzsaw-and-angry-hornets sound of computer games loading into our Atari 800 home computer from cassette tape. What I never knew, until today, was that real live vinyl records have been released containing program data. kempa.com provides an entertaining and exhaustive overview of this weirdness, which was seemingly only perpetrated by British artists with a penchant for Lord Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum home computer.
I don’t know what’s more amazing: that artists included unlistenable, speaker-destroying sounds at the ends of their pop records (and in some cases even coded the games that those sounds represented!), or that record companies actually agreed to release them. But I can completely relate to the type of geek, lurking squarely at the intersection of music nerd and computer nerd, who would risk hearing loss to dub the squealing buzzes to cassette and feed them into their computers - even if the result was sometimes a King’s-Quest-style text adventure game starring the Thompson Twins!?!