HARDWAREZ sees multi-instrumentalist and MBR mastermind Vittorio D’Amore (aka Victor Love) aurally exploring the duality of technology and humanity in nine 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 fourteen 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.
“While the early compositions happened during live streams, I added rhythm guitar overdubs off the records in the final stages,” Love continues. “This synergy with the synth guitars creates a massive and powerful sound in the studio, just as it does during our live performances. Shreddy also recorded the lead guitars along the chiptune leads adding a lot of attack and an unique energy to the solo sections.The overall production level is much higher than previous releases, contributing to a new, upgraded signature sound.
“With this album the 486DX-33MHz-64MB becomes sentient through human augmentation. For we may become better humans with their help, but machines still need us to shine.”
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.”
Side A:
BIOS
MOBO
CPU
GPU
RAM
Side B:
FDD
HDD
PSU
CASE
