NES-ified Dark Side of the Moon is certifiably awesome

Pink Floyd released their progressive rock classic The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, a decade before Nintendo launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan. But what would the album sound like if, say, Koji Kondo had used it as a score for an NES game?

Videogame programmer Brad Smith has done just that: he has remixed TDSotM using only the 8-bit sounds available on an NES sound chip. He calls it MOON8, and it’s available for download (with appropriately low-resolution album art) on his Web site — not as ten discrete tracks, but as “side one” and “side two,” just like the original vinyl release of TDSotM. You can also check out the album as a playlist of six YouTube videos.

I’m a huge fan of the original record, and I really enjoyed this lo-fi remix — Smith did a particularly great job of rendering Clare Torrey’s soaring vocal solo in NES form. Maybe we’ll hear some of it at Blipfest 2010!

MOON8 [Brad Smith via Robert Ashley’s Twitter]