Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022

About the album

"Dower uses MIDI to create uneasy pseudo-mechanical versions of clapped-out bargain bin smoove jazz, twisting the edges just enough to keep us listening. You'd be surprised at how well it works." - Boomkat

Reclusive Melbourne electronic figure Jeremy Dower announces a quarter century-spanning compilation of previously unreleased music, split into halves to showcase his unpronounceable 90s ambient techno project Tetrphnm, as well as the wistful faux-jazz electronica made subsequently under his own name.

Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is the culmination of Chapter Music’s ongoing reissue series for Jeremy. In August, Chapter made his earlier albums available digitally for the first time ever - Sentimental Dance Music For Couples (originally released in 2000 via US label Plug Research, home to releases by Flying Lotus and Jon Tejada) and Music For the Young and the Restless (originally released in 2004 on Japanese imprint Bit Of Heaven). We also released a mini album Music For Retirement Villages, Circa 2050 on 12" and CD back in 2002.

Inspired at first by austere German electronica such as Monolake and Mouse on Mars, Jeremy’s sound world grew to take in influences as various as The Sea and Cake, Joao Gilberto and Jaki Liebezeit and Alain Goraguer. But Jeremy worked through these touchstones all alone on the other side of the world, at first improvising systems of “subtractive composition” via cheap 90s sound cards, 12 bit samplers and banked noise gates.

His music evolved in a parallel but separate world to genres like IDM and Microhouse, but really it sounds like nothing but Jeremy Dower – magically inventive, touching and personal.

Over the last 25 years Jeremy has worked as a designer for computer games, written a PhD thesis on music production and visual art, had an exhibition of dog art shown in New York, Berlin and Melbourne, designed live visuals for Gotye and had an 8bit version of the Simpsons Theme go viral and end up being used in the Simpons itself!

Efficient Space comped a Tetrphnm track on their much-loved 2018 compilation of 90s Australian electronica 3AM Spares. But Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is your first chance to explore Jeremy Dower’s compelling musical history with the depth it deserves.