Listening: Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube
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This is the seventieth anniversary of Namco, which was originally founded in 1955 as a company that installed and operated coin-operated rides at department stores before moving into electro-mechanical games in the ’60s and then video games in the ’70s. In honor of the anniversary, there’s a collaborative project called United Tribute Arrange Force (referencing Bandai Namco’s United Galaxy Space Force shared universe) where a bunch of random groups are doing different Namco remix albums.
STAFFcirc’s contribution to UTAF is SORA SUITE, a cover album of eleven tracks from the Taiko no Tatsujin series of rhythm games. It starts off with four random selections, but the bulk of the album is the titular suite covering all seven “SORA” songs. This is a series of seven numbered pieces by multiple composers that are all space-themed; there are some incredible good original pieces in this series, particularly the ones by Hisui, my second-favorite overall Taiko composer, and MONACA composer Ryuichi Takada. So there’s some good taste occurring in STAFFcirc HQ, is what I’m saying.
Most of the arrangements here don’t take the original material in radical new directions, keeping the melodies, harmonies, and general feelings intact while mixing up some instrumentation and partwriting; for these my enjoyment was directly correlated with how much I liked the original tracks, some I might’ve liked a little more due to being synthier. There are a few more transformative arrangements too and I thought they were all pretty interesting takes on the originals. All in all a pretty tasteful album, and I’m 100% always on board with suckering more people to listen to Taiko no Tatsujin music, especially the “SORA” series.
There’s a video upload for this album too with some slightly less flashy visuals compared to the last one; instead of unique animations, this one instead replicates the Taiko interface with fake notecharts for each song except one (there are instead performance videos for the final track, “Swan Song”). That’s right, they charted nearly every song specifically for the purposes of this video, which is kinda fucked up if you think about it.
Recommended tracks:
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“black cherry scar (mint tears)” (trace lab, orig. silver coin) takes an Orange Lounge-style electronic bossa nova song and fucks it up with distortion and noise
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“Alien Pioneer (SORA-II Gliese 581)” (quarkimo, orig. Ryuichi Takada) adds in some quirky electronic sound design that I think meshes with the quirky original composition pretty well
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“SüPΞRB★5T4ЯLïИG (SORA-V Cosmic Bird)” (Wishful Simping, orig. Torine) takes a sparse, chippy tune with some sneakily weird chords and gives it a brash, funky dance music makeover
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