Listening: Bandcamp
Contest info: website

Info

I originally started this paragraph with the sentence “time for this thing again,” but I pulled up my post for contest #18 (TODO: fix link) to reference something and apparently I literally did that last time. Well anyway, it’s time for this thing again! The track order and cover art just got finalized so the music could be released on Bandcamp, so now I get to post about it and reduce my prewritten post backlog by one.

For this, as ever, a small community that lives on Discord solicits a bunch of random samples from each other (instruments, musical phrases, loops, speech, random noises, etc.), and then they have a couple of months to make some pieces using only those samples. Sometimes it has an obvious plunderphonics sound of a bunch of disparate sounds mashed together (especially when voice clips are concerned), and sometimes the samples are manipulate to hell and back and you end up in sound design paradise.

It’s been more than a year since the last one, a little bit longer than usual because no one had the availability to run the thing, not a complaint or anything since I certainly wasn’t volunteering to. This time the samples were divided into four categories which were even more abstract than bouba and kiki: up, down, strange, and charm (all types of quarks). This was met with a little bit of consternation due to its arbitrariness and somewhat lack of usefulness, but it was definitely funny to do one time.

Some work has been going on to start holding smaller compos in between the main events, so I might be posting more frequently about these in the future? Time will tell!

Recommended tracks:

  • Whopper Pop” (PaperKitty) has kind of a tracker feel to it, pretty nice chords in this one too

  • Flam Mode” (joncarlo) sounds like it’s in a more difficult time signature than it really is due to all the syncopation

  • DSi(nsect)” (Lasertooth) has some nice warpy chords

  • Leviculus Sopor Diu” (KungFuFurby) is some pretty nice ambient

  • lennon walk” (aji) has a bunch of cool mechanical-sounding drum sounds

  • The Library Got Rid of VHS Tapes” (Aniserim) was one of the most clearly plunderphonics-sounding tracks in the contest, cool vibe

  • Oceanics” (mandrasigma & Hunter Van Brocklin) was my favorite track of the compo, killer chords throughout

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