Listening: Bandcamp
Latest installment of a regular contest where a bunch of unnecessarily talented digital fusion artists submit short audio clips and then have a couple of months to make music using only those samples. This is always a semiannual highlight for me.
This contest had a vague theme where the samples were categorized into two buckets: bouba and kiki. This was merely for organization and there were no rules or restrictions regarding the sample categories, but you'll find this referenced in a couple of track titles.
Recommended tracks:
-
"Komorebi" (zenkusa) starts off like a classic Dragon Quest town theme before blasting off into characteristic zenk harmonic magic
-
"modern convenience" (mandrasigma) has some pretty nice sound design, and the slightly glitchy echoed piano line really resonates with me for some reason
-
"Oneirogate" (petet) was the winner and deservedly so, very very impressive sample manipulation paired with beautiful compositional ebbs and flows and emotionally hard-hitting chord changes
-
"Epsilon Prime" (Kris Troutman) is a ten minute exploration of the distinct, singular universe that all Kris Troutman music comes from
-
"jungle_texture" (tdstr) is a jungle texture
-
"KikiQuest.smc" (Hunter Van Brocklin) is an SNES tune by someone who's been exploring/abusing the sound chip's pitch modulation/filter/etc. capabilities recently (and is actually writing a guide on it), very disorienting piece of music