On March 15, they unleashed a brand new site design onto the world, designed by minusbaby and coded by openBack, two of the official 8bp posse. The site is not yet operating at 100%; several sections, such as the retro artpacks and hardware and software sections, are currently under construction for expansion, but all the music is available for consumption. Additionally, there’s now an 8bitpeoples shop, featuring a professionally produced copy of their two-CD fiftieth album, Blip Festival shirts and a DVD of the 2006 event, and a Little Sound Dj cartridge.
I’ve noticed occasional slow load times and generic errors while loading pages, hopefully both of which will be fixed once the new site is broken in. Check it out, and long live the chiptune.
Shnabubula was kind enough to let me check out the album on the sly back in January, but now that it’s finally out, I’m glad to post about it. Released via II(read: Pause), Controller 1 finally saw the light last week. That’s some pretty awesome concept art from Francis Coulombe, am I right?
Produced by chiptune scene fanatic Shawn Phase, this original chiptune-style album is inspired by the buttons of the classic NES controller, featuring titles all derived from the various controls. Quoth Somnambula:
Take a journey across the face of an old NES controller. Each button has a story to tell if you’re willing to listen. Some of them have been forsaken by their fellow buttons while others are living the good life. Come listen and find out what goes on inside your controller when you’re not around.
I’d recommend something specific, but you’re really not gonna go wrong checking any of this out. At just over 35 minutes and not costing you a dime, you’ve gotta swing over to II and grab this quickly. Tell your friends about it. This album is wild per Sam’s usual craziness.
Early this week, the regulars of SoundTempest were treated to a surprise when legendary Commodore composer and demoscene enthusiast Jeroen “WAVE” Tel showed up to participate in SoundTempest’s regular compo series, CompoST.
zircon, SoundTempest’s creator, hollered at me to come on over, and CHz and I joined in the discussion while OverCoat and other ST regulars got along famously with Tel as well as Peter “Skaven” Habja, who also stopped by briefly.
Anyone can join in future original music compos with CompoST by joining #soundtempest on the EsperNet network via IRC. Thanks to OverCoat, you never know who will show up!
Manhattan art space The Tank and New York artist collective 8bitpeoples announce the Blip Festival 2007, a four-day music and multimedia event taking place in New York City November 29 - December 2, 2007. Focusing on the modern artistic exploration of primitive video game and home computer technology and featuring 40 musicians and visualists from around the world, the Blip Festival showcases artists adopting and repurposing familiar but forgotten hardware - such as the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari game console and home computer line, and the Nintendo Game Boy - exploring their untapped potential and unique aesthetic character.
Blip Festival 2007 has come and gone, but the legend shall live on. The event featured Nullsleep, Blasterhead, and other big names from the modern chiptune scene getting down and dirty in New York’s The Tank. On Friday, November 30, one of the performers was Jake “virt” Kaufman, riding the wave of his most recently released game work, Contra 4.
Today, virt posted the six songs he played during his set. The set included arrangements of past songs he wrote (including one from a game he scored, Shantae), an arrangement of Jamiroquai’s “Love Foolosophy,” and a few original pieces. Check the video below for a short snippet of his performance of “DnB Chip Mix 07″:
“DnB Chip Mix 07″ gets my vote for best track by being an epic nine and a half minutes of FM bliss, but also worth mentioning is “Loli Fishing Next 20,000 Leagues,” a chiptune arrangement of a Kwakfest piece. Really, though, you can’t go wrong with any piece.
I’m pleased to announce that, as of this morning, we’ve surpassed the 5000 album milestone. While not every one of those albums is a perfect entry, with fully researched tracklist/artist information, I think we’ve made some great progress towards that goal, and we’re now offering a significant amount of information that was previously not available anywhere.
In addition, earlier this week we exceeded 100,000 total album page views. I’ve been particularly pleased to notice that many of our pages have top billing in the Google search results for their catalog number.
So anyway, I’d like to thank all of you for everything that we’ve been able to achieve here. It’s made me very happy to see a lot of new names on the active members list, many of whom have already made significant contribution; keep up the great work.
I’vepersonallyaddedanumberofalbumsontoVGMdb, and fellow VG Frequency writer ‘Ili “CHz” Butterfield is on staff there as well, so I’m definitely glad to see the concept take off and do a great job working with all of the VGM catalog sites out there to not only aggregate the information, but provide an even more comprehensive, interactive, more easily expandable destination to learn more about video game music. Any site with me in the database has to be good!
kingshriek is bankable when it comes to obscure or hard-to-find video game soundtracks in video game music formats. Offering up rare GBS (Game Boy), HES (TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine) & NSF (Nintendo/Famicom) format soundtracks, kingshriek’s Rip Page holds a lot of buried treasures.
And indeed, speaking of treasure, it was through kingshriek that I found out the previous existing soundtrack rip of Tim Follin’s 1991 NES soundtrack Treasure Master had two missing tracks. UNACCEPTABLE, I know.
Recognizing king’s efforts in propagating classic game music, it was great to read that late last week, he unveiled a preliminary version of the long-conceptualized, long-awaited streamable Sega Saturn Sound Format or SSF. SSF is based off the plugin format of Neil Corlett’s PlayStation Sound Format (PSF) plugin, Highly Experimental.
SSF is still in the very preliminary stages, so it’s far from optimization. Of note, the various programs involved in the format have been undergoing fairly frequent updates. But if you feel like you can’t wait to fire up the Panzer Dragoon II Zwei soundtrack and test things out, check out the SSF page, read through all of the information and get-a-goin’.
Depending on how quickly development on the plug-in moves now that mass testing is available via this release, maybe we’ll see SSF support integrated into OC ReMix’s Chipamp plugin bundle.
Joshua Morse is one of those restless groovemakers, and one of the more temperamental artists I’ve ever had to deal with. He’s akin to my own version of Kanye West. With that said, get in line for some praise if you’re a fan of the Sega Genesis and FM synths of the Yamaha YM2612 sound chip.
This past Wednesday, Morse released a 20-minute EP called Waveform featuring five original pieces constructed from the musical building blocks of the Mega Drive. A quick listen, there’s definitely a lot of good stuff to enjoy.
“Alligators” has some similarities to djpretzel’s “Consent (Make Me Dance)” in that it has a really solid groove and also sounds like something that could conceivably fit into a Shinobi title, even being a little outside the box. Meanwhile, the energy of “Corridor” is just what’s needed as a solid boss/battle theme for particularly long challenge.
Lots of good nostalgic feelings, as you can conceivably picture all five of these tracks in use within some of your favorite 16-bit games of the past. There’s nothing precluding you from giving this a look. Once you’re converted, you may end up stopping by Josh’s musicpages and grabbing everything you can.
I loves me some netlabels. As a big proponent of free music (not ideologically, don’t worry), some of the most creative music you’ll find doesn’t cost you more than the time it takes to download.
Obviously, I spend a lot of time involved in the video game music rearrangement community, but netlabels feature great collectives of talent doing original music as well.
Like any hobbyist initiative, productivity can sometimes be intermittent. My favorite netlabel Hellven, run by Xavier “mv” Dang, has stopped and started on several occasions. This makes it difficult to find a really steady source of content to satisfy your fix.
One of the other latest netlabels with strong ties toward the game music arrangement community that I’ve been made aware of has been Jonas “Platonist” Loman’s effort, Reunion, which announced last month that its site had gone out of beta stage into a final release. They have a lot of good artists I’m aware of from OC ReMix including FFmusic Dj, GaMeBoX, Saiko, SGX, Siamey, The Joker, and even guest releases by Binster and OverCoat. They’ve hit a pretty good stride, just announcing their 45th single release (courtesy of GaMeBoX), so give ‘em a look and bask in the free.
Two foundations of the Commodore arrangement scene received facelifts late last night as Remix.Kwed.Org creator Jan Lund “Kwed” Thomas and C64Audio.com creator Chris Abbott each revealed their respective sites’ new looks.
Following up AMIGAremix’s redesign earlier this year, Kwed collaborated with John Mirland to streamline R:K:O, featuring the addition of randomized SID downloads to encourage the remixing of broader material, as well as community links, donor thanks, and better integration of the C64 Take-away podcast.
C64Audio, noted vendor of professionally released Commodore community music from both C64 arrangers & composers, debuted its first major redesign in roughly 5 years, with emphasis placed on frontpage listings of its CD catalog. Soon-to-be-available releases there include Makke’s new album It’s Binary, Baby, as well as the Back in Time Live DVD/CD Set.
Congrats to ravon & the Ormgas.com crew for collaborating with djp to get a link to the webstream on the OCR front page (and the return of the ReMix Roulette). It’s all looking good, and we’re more than glad for the extra attention! Good work, bros.
Quite the good week for stuff, IMO, but let’s leave that up to you. I’ve looked all over in particular this week, so let’s jump right into the material for the week ending July 31st: (more…)
Ormgas.com, OverClocked ReMix’s unofficial internet radio station, wants YOU for its jingle contest, now underway and set to end on July 10th. We need artists, remixers and anyone willing to have some fun with a microphone to check out the contest and submit 20-to-40-second station identification style jingles, and if you’re one of the top 3 entrants, you can clothe your body with hot OMG FREE Ormgas.com gear. As long as your entry is quality, you can potentially earn radio infamy along with other legends (like Liontamer) as one of Ormgas.com regular jingles, so be sure to check out more information at the OCR forums thread as well as the full set of contest rules over at http://oc.ormgas.com/news.php?extend.36. Antonio Pizza, SgtRama, Neskvartetten & OverCoat are already in the game with their own entries, and I encourage you reading this [Larry points at you] to consider submitting your own jingles in support of Ormgas while you get in the hunt for free, fashionable swag. Please don’t delay. July 10th’s the final deadline.
Y’all need to make some Ormgas jingles, or I’ll kill you. Pick the fun choice. Make a jingle. Let’s check out what was going on for the week ending Saturday, June 19th: (more…)
Liontamer wrote… Ormgas.com, OverClocked ReMix’s unofficial internet radio station, wants YOU for its jingle contest, now underway and set to end on July 10th. We need artists, remixers and anyone willing to have some fun with a microphone to check out the contest and submit 30-to-40-second station identification style jingles, and if you’re one of the top 3 entrants, you can clothe your body with hot OMG FREE Ormgas.com gear. As long as your entry is quality, you can potentially earn radio infamy along with other legends (like Liontamer) as one of Ormgas.com regular jingles, so be sure to check out more information at the OCR forums thread as well as the full set of contest rules over at http://oc.ormgas.com/news.php?extend.36. Antonio Pizza, SgtRama & Neskvartetten are already in the game with their own entries, and I encourage you reading this [Larry points at you] to consider submitting your own jingles in support of Ormgas while you get in the hunt for free, fashionable swag. Please don’t delay. July 10th’s the final deadline.
JigginJonT had the foresight (i.e. gall) to make sure that if I had my own forum at Ormgas.com I’d be open for plenty of the Larry-bashing that makes VG Frequency such an enjoyable experience for all. Register at Ormgas and drop by your insults at the official Larry Oji hate thread. Because I LOVE to hear what you bastards have to say. I hate you, Jon. And because I hate all of you out there so much, it’s time to once again use some of my free time this week to look around the remix community for tracks so you don’t have to. What the hell was I thinking? Let’s take a look at some of what’s good for the week ending June 12th:
Early this week, the regulars of 
Joshua Morse