Listening: Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube
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Now it’s time for volume 9, with a title harkening back to FM Sound Module Maniax, a 2006 compilation album of a bunch of random game composers writing FM music. This album collects a bunch of the usual suspects and two super surprise guest stars (both of whom I’ve written about before!) writing plain ol’ MIDIs for a bunch of different devices, ranging from standard stuff like the Roland SC-55 to some unusual ones like the Roland PMA-5. The full download even comes with the MIDI files so you can play them on your own devices, because you definitely own at least one each of the nearly twenty used on this album.
This one is stylistically a bit more eclectic than the last, with there being some electronic dance and ambient music of course but also jazz fusion, prog, and some other stuff you probably like. Some tracks have standard MIDI sound production and others go in on awesome sound design you wouldn’t believe was coming from a standard MIDI device if you didn’t know ahead of time. There’s cute music and there’s calm music and there’s dark music and there’s evocative music. And just like the last album, there’s a ton of cool composition on display too.
So about those guest stars! For this album they recruited two Japanese composers who wrote and released MIDI music in the ’90s: Toyokazu Nagaishi, who contributed to albums by the circle @MIDI’s people Record and whose track here is a followup to the one he wrote for the album @MIDI’s mind, and Kenichi Koyano, who contributed music to DTM Magazine in a regular column and whose track here is an updated version of one he wrote for a 1996 issue. I gotta tell you that I lost my mind twice during the album premiere when their names came up. Unbelievably cool to have gotten them on board, and their tracks are great to boot.
If you want to listen to the album in full, I highly recommend doing so through the official video, featuring 3D models by Cryptovolans animated with MIDI visualizations by @ompuco. The video is so powerful that it actually broke YouTube during the second premiere, forcing them to very hastily reupload the second half so we could keep listening to it.
Recommended tracks:
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“Ruins of the Forest Temple” (Tancla) definitely hits those forest ruins vibes with mallet percussion and mystical chords
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“Don’t get him mad!” (cubenoy22) sounds like a funny action or battle theme from the Paper Mario series
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“Cascade rev.2023” (Kenichi Koyano) has a sick Koyano chord progression at 1:47 and has this 5-5-6 figure accompanying most of the track, which is a kind of bumpy-but-still-in-4/4 rhythm I strongly associate with him
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“Yakumotatsu” (HueArme) is a standardly produced HueArme MIDI, which means it somehow sounds like a full-production dance track made in a normal DAW (the reason it does is because it has more MIDI events in it than god herself could count)
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“Badlands” (tenby) is PSX-era DnB vibes
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“Pleochroism” (Blitz Lunar and Cryptovolans as Match Grip) is some hot jazz fusion
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