phin 'n' games (don't fear the reaper)

Got into a nice discussion about the philosophical issues pertaining to "new old skool" with major exponent-proponent Tim Reaper  and Pete Devnull over at the Retromania blog, in the comments after this post....  (Third Form from Dissensus also chipping in with some unusual angles)

Tim and Pete were kind enough to point me in the direction of superior examples of the form

And I must say this chap Phineus II does blast away my hackles

It's like a perfect combo of the period-precise replication so uncanny it's like time-travel, but with a degree of intricacy that befits this obsessive-compulsive age. 

As Pete says: 

"it's jungle, classic sounding jungle, made on Amigas and Akais with 90s synths and nothing that would tip you off to it being made 25 years later. But the level of detail to the tracks is just so intense, you'd be hard pressed to find many (any?) actual 93-95s release with that amount of work. People simply didn't have time to do all that back then, since the scene was changing so fast. They didn't have 10,12,15, however many years Mikey [Phineus II] has been doing this to really dig into a particular style, figure out all the rules, and then cheekily start messing with them. At the same time, it still has that 100% rugged bedroom studio feel to it, not some overpolished aseptic "mastery" of a genre."