Official: https://benedictroffmarsh.com/2025/12/19/megatone-men/
Bandcamp: https://benedictroff-marsh.bandcamp.com ... gatone-men
"Megatone Men" carries a lot of the ideas of Hi-NRG from the early to mid-80s. Hi_NRG, while rarely acknowledged as a form, defined so much of what happened not only in straight Pop but Post Punk for a decade or more. If you are not familiar with the form, perhaps start with Tk#5 "Video Spy" as it is the most obvious.
I took some of those tropes, like the octave bass jump, and built some of the form. I then worked it into my own style. While some may feel that Disco etc has nothing in common with pure EM, Patrick Cowley did it in 1981.
Yes my cover art is deliberately paying pretty close homage to Cowley's Megatron Man album. It is all discussed on the official page linked above.
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For the synthspotters
Everything was done in Reason 13. Most instruments are Europa, Thor, Polytone, Algoritm, Subtractor but my own ARK 2601 and Mini PD VST feature a bit. Effects are again Reason stock with my own specialist devices.
No AI, no Loops, No samples (except for drums on one piece), No MeloTune (but I vocoded).
The vocals were written by me (no Chap GPU), but I did use Text To Speech. This is not AI. Text to speech existed existed waaaaay before this AI BS thing. While modern T2S is part of the new game, and I would have preferred old-school method, this is what showed up so I used it.
