Listening: SoundCloud
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Closing out this year in album posts with a new SoundCloud release by enigmatic composer Espio the Chameleon, a Sonic character who is both real AND a musician apparently. Their aesthetic can be described as “Mystcore plunderphonics,” deep ambience constructed from samples and loops, some recognizable and some destroyed beyond recognition. The connection goes beyond just music inspired by games of that genre: the track titles all look like filenames of audio assets copied out of a game’s data directory, and their only like is a (cool) track from the 2001 point-and-clicker Schizm: Mysterious Journey. Everything they make is a showcase of some incredibly cool glitchy, ambient sound design.
You’d never guess it from the title, but this album, materials_22, consists of their material from the year ’22. The first four tracks were their entries to Sample Pack Contest XVI, and the rest were otherwise publicly unreleased until now and fall into two categories: tracks 5-18 all have color-related titles and tracks 19-30 are just letters and numbers. While the music is all pretty similar, the color tracks are generally a bit lower key, and the letter/number tracks are a bit more in your face and glitchier. Get lost in a mechanical sound world full of mysterious contraptions today!
Recommended tracks:
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“boilerroom_1_puzzle_solved” has a synth melody at 1:00 that I’ve only realized just now reminds me of the Splatoon 2 single-player overworld themes (I’ve had Splatoon music on my mind a lot recently)
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“yellow” repeats a drums & panflute part three times starting at 0:47, and the way it just cuts off each time is really powerful to me for some reason
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“m31-2” I find really calming despite (or maybe because of!) all the loud glitchy noises
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