Listening: Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube
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There’ve been three STAFFcirc releases this year so far and I really ought to start actually listening to them, and they’re a really natural followup to Sample Pack Contest so now’s a great time to crank them out. Volume X, which to be very clear is not volume 10, is a remix album for ringtones, featuring jingles from Nokia, Yamaha, Samsung, Apple, etc. expanded into pieces of music that are longer than 10 seconds.
As is pretty standard for these compilations, the arrangers all generally just did their own thing, so the instrumentation randomly changes from synths to chiptune to a cappella and the genres randomly change from EDM to samba to glitchy noise disaster. Some tracks sample the original ringtone directly and some don’t, some tracks are pretty conservative in their expansions and some get real freaky with it. They also followed up their surprise recruitment of two veteran Japanese composers on volume 9 by getting two of the original ringtone composers to arrange their own compositions, Lars Edvall and Paul Bergman.
It’s fun! Not the most ridiculous batch of music they’ve ever released by any stretch, but pretty fun.
If you check out the full album, I definitely recommend doing so through the video upload featuring unique visualizations for each track by zipdisq, who also arranged a piece.
Recommended tracks:
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“By The Seaside Circuit” (doctorn0gloff, orig. Adam Young) is kind of a mashup with “Donut Plains” from Super Mario Kart
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“by’s discovery” (centurion.cee, orig. Hannu af Ursin) is also SNES-y but has more JRPG vibes
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“your ego shouldn’t be up in the sky” (amos.sys, orig. unknown) is vaporwave on a malfunctioning tape deck
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“Dismemberimba” (Hunter van Brocklin, orig. unknown) does what it says on the tin and dismembers a marimba
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“Beneath the sea my scales are warped and flaking” (azurglade, orig. unknown) crosses calm ambient riffs with tense drums and synthwave sounds and is also malfunctioning a bit, I didn’t pick three malfunctioning tracks in a row on purpose but I’m also not going to apologize for it
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“bad momentum” (crazygoji, orig. Brian Salter) is some wonky dance music
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