With musical formats changing as quickly as British weather, we're always playing catch up and spending money on something that's outdated as soon as you've bought it.

But what's surprising is that no matter how advanced and expensive a lot of the new technology apears, it seems that there's a certain warmth and character to the way things were with formats  in the 60's and 70's that consumers are realising that it's time to look back rather than play catch up.

The vinyl revolution is the most obvious example of a retro revolution. But there's another old format that has become hardly known: the 8-track cartridge.

To his credit, Geoff Barrow of Portishead and composer Ben Salisbury have taken it upon themselves to raise awareness and spread the love they have for the format.

Barrow's label Invada Records are celebrating 'International 8-Track Day' by premiering a short film and announcing the release of an extremely limited amount of Free Fire 8-track cartridges, featuring music from Barrow & Salisbury’s score to Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire. The film is released tonight in North America.

Watch the short film to see the 8-track cartridge in action and hear a preview of the score

Free Fire sees Barrow and Salisbury take a huge directional curve away from their intense, synth-based Ivor Novello award winning score for Ex Machina, with the composers curating a prog-rock, free-jazz, psychedelic journey influenced by bands such as King Crimson, Camel and Magma and tips its hat to the Lalo Schifrin thriller genre scores of that era.

You can get Free Fire on 8 track cartridge and other formats 

Tracklist

1. Sledgehammer Cracks Nut
2. First Shot
3. The Phone Rings
4. Crawl Chase
5. Lead Lobotomy
6. We Can't All Be Nice Girls
7. Oh Fuck
8. Justine's Theme