VG Frequency

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.

In the 1-hour time limit compo featuring a factory theme, Tel competed alongside OverCoat, madbrain, Nario and Coda, scoring the victory with his track “Industrial Factory”, available from the CompoST 72’s archive.

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.

The ultimate new resource on video game music albums is growing like a weed. On November 3rd, VGMdb creator (and music curator of Slightly Dark) Ken “Secret Squirrel” Moore announced what he dubbed a milestone for the database. It’s hard to disagree:

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’ve personally added a number of albums onto VGMdb, 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!

Popular netlabel Hellven relaunched yesterday, providing the first new material from the music collective in 2 years. With artwork and design handled by fellow artist Hans “hunz” van Vliet, label creator Xavier “mv” Dang announced Hellven’s return with the release of a group album entitled Debut.

The full-length album includes most of the artists comprising Hellven’s fifth incarnation, featuring virt, hunz, epoq, rs3, funkymuskrat, xerxes & mv.

Comments and feedback can be left at the site’s forums. Keep an eye on Hellven in the coming days for a full statement from mv on the return of Hellven, as well as what’s in store for the site and its artists in the near-future.