Game info: website
Listening: Steam
Info
kyoheifujita has a new release for the first time in four years, which means I get to post about him for the first time here. He’s a self-described “chiptronica” artist, which you might assume means chiptune EDM, but that’s very much not the case! His music is usually much more delicate, calm, and sparse, crossing chiptune sounds with acoustic instrumentation (especially piano), classically-influenced melodies and arrangements, and a bit of jazz harmony; the electronic part of “chiptronica” comes more to play in the production side than the genre side, which his songs frequently featuring heavy filters on the chip sounds, glitchiness, and digital fusion-y fast instrument swaps. His music is really instantly identifiable I think, due to the inherent wistfulness and way he lo-fi filters already lo-fi chip sounds. He also likes goofing around with odd time in sometimes subtle and sometimes trickily syncopated ways, which definitely isn’t the reason I got into his music shut up
His latest game work, MotionRec, is a puzzle platformer where you can record your movements and then play them back somewhere else, so you could record yourself climbing a ladder and then play back your ascent in a different room without a ladder to reach a place you couldn’t otherwise, stuff like that. The game has pixel graphics, which is a clear fit for chiptune music, and the world graphics are predominantly monochrome, which I think fits fujita because his music often feels black-and-white to me in a way (note: I am not at all synesthetic). A lot of the soundtrack here does have his usual style to it, though there are a couple of pure soundscape tracks, a few most straightforwardly jazzy tunes in the "interlude"s, and also one actual for real EDM track in “Kill Order.” The ending theme is a vocal performed by his artpop project La bit Pluie with singer Mw. and visual artist mol, though it sounds a lot like “kyoheifujita music with vocals” so it’s not really a stylistic outlier like the oontz oontz track.
Pretty decent soundtrack! I generally like fujita’s more recent works over his earlier ones because they’re a little more adventurous in composition and production, and while this is maybe just a tiny bit less experimental than his work for say artist Hermippe’s art exhibition Mitsurin, it’s still in his modern style and it’s still got some weird in it. I usually find his stuff enjoyable, not a top favorite but still fun, and that’s definitely the case here too.
Recommended tracks:
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“Adventure” has some processed snaps and stuff at the start and I swear one of them has got to be the sound of a tape deck closing, anyway this one’s pretty hard to keep track of metrically in the first minute
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“interlude2” was my favorite harmonically of the interlude tracks, it gets a bit bumbling at the end which is fun
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“Embers” was one of the most overtly classically-influenced tracks to me; it very much sounds like a solo organ piece, especially from 0:21 to 0:50
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“Edge of Light” is one of the glitchiest and noisiest pieces in the game
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“Memory Loom” is that vocal ending theme so parts of it are arranged much louder and more fully than the rest of the soundtrack, giving some textural contrast by showing what happens when fujita unleashes many layers at once instead of just a small handful
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