Listening: Bandcamp
Contest info: website (requires logging in)
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Sample Pack Contest #21 just wrapped up voting a couple of weeks ago and the album just hit the Bandcamp. As you might be able to gather from the subtitle of this contest, the theme for samples this year was for them to “represent the future” to the submitters, so there were a bunch of space-y and synthy/electronic noises this year. As well as your usual quota of random crap, like the main vocal sample from that title theme from the Amiga version of Moon Child that went viral earlier this year for some reason. There’s also a new web platform for hosting the contest, though it’s heavily AI-coded and requires entering an email address to access any of the contest info so I have no idea what the results are besides which entry won, but thankfully the Bandcamp lists the artists as always.
In this installment there were less tracks that took my breath away than the last one, but the overall “yeah I liked that” bar was hit more consistently, so I think I liked it a little more than the last one on average. Part of that is probably just that someone who I’ve felt has been a pretty solid contributor over the past few contests, DrTapeworm, had a whole seven entries this time. (I won’t be posting any of them due to my variety-forcing policy of skipping people whose tracks I included in the last SPC post, but they were nice!) The other part is that it felt like there was more show-offy or fucked up sound design this round, or at least more than there was in the tracks that I kept from the last round, and I always love hearing people getting freaky with the limited sound options.
Recommended tracks:
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“it makes this sound…” (golden furniture) has some of the wettest breakcore sounds I’ve ever heard
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“UrbEx” (Neil Biggin) has an impressively wide EDM sound (and yes if you’re familiar, this is in fact ’90s game composer Neil Biggin)
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“Broken promise of Utopia” (14.14) hits that Moon Child sample starting at 4:02
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“hitting the future rq” (anosci) is in the hit em genre
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“Extended Hyperspeed Stasis” (tdstr) brings in this super harsh bedoop sound that I really like for some reason after it changes to breakcore
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“starry skeye” (jæmes) was my favorite entry compositionally
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