Archive for December, 2017

Mario Syndrome For the Holidays!

Monday, December 25th, 2017

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all enjoy your holiday.

Christmas is nearly over here in Japan, and I had a decent one, considering that my boyfriend was sick and I couldn’t see him. That was a downer, but on the upside Christmas isn’t a big holiday here – meaning all the record stores were still open. And strangely enough, a lot of them were having anime/game music sales. So it looks like my Christmas gift to Japan this year was poor spending habits. I bought a lot of really weird stuff, including this!

Bonus 21
Mario Syndrome
Mario Syndrome (Remix Version)
Princess Peach
I’ve actually been looking for this one for ages. It’s an early example of “arranged” (remixed) game music that takes audio from the game and adds upon it with original instrumentation and even some vocals. There are better arrangements of the Mario theme music out there, no doubt, but very few are as “80s” as this one. It’s pumped full of random samples from the game, and pulses with drum beats that were most likely taken from an 808 or equivalent software. A Japanese breakdancer cut loose to this one, I’m sure of it.

The title track and the remix are reworkings of the main overworld theme to the first game, while “Princess Peach” is a version of the underwater music, complete with lyrics. Said lyrics are entirely in Japanese, and I can only pick up every sixth word so I’m afraid I won’t be offering a translation tonight.

The credited artist here is Bonus 21, and this is their only release. The linear notes list the main members as Shunji Inoue and Hiroyuki Tanaka, who were in the pop group Neverland, they didn’t do any other game music release from what I can tell.

I have about 10 days off starting on the 27th, and I plan on hopefully getting some long in-the-works pieces done, both here and on Mostly-Retro. My health hasn’t been great as of late, but I’m finally starting to recover, so expect a lot more content next month! Once again, Merry Christmas and, if I don’t get another post out before, happy new year! Here’s hoping we all survive 2018.

Posted in Complete Albums | No Comments »

Have An 8-bit Christmas with GMO Christmas Song

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Lazy Game Reviews. I’m a sucker for old DOS games, and I really appreciate his dry humor and attention to detail. Last week, he shared a thrifting find, a cassette tape of “computer” holiday music. It’s not bad, but it also wasn’t what I was hoping for when I first clicked on the video. It’s too modern-sounding, and at times sounds like something you might hear pumped into a department store. It’s just not idiosyncratic or offbeat enough. And its certainly not “computer” enough.

But then I remembered that I had something that perfectly fit that description.

GMO Christmas Songs
This is GMO’s Christmas album. GMO was a record label founded in the mid-80s by members of Yellow Magic Orchestra. It was created solely to publish game music soundtracks. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to come across 80s game music vinyl, it was probably released by GMO.

GMO Christmas Song is the only release by the label that is not a collection of game music in some way. Instead, it is an original compilation featuring “game music” renditions of holiday classics. Today this would be called chiptune, but that word didn’t exist back in 1987, when this first came out.

The artists responsible for these 8-bit interpretations of holiday standards aren’t notable names of game music. I’ve never heard of any of them to be honest. I had to look them to see that two of them, Yashuhiko Fukuda and Nobuyuki Nakamura, are rather accomplished anime composers. But don’t let that discourage you from checking this out, it’s a lot of fun.

I have no idea as to what equipment this music was performed on. While it’s obviously going for an 8-bit style, it sounds just a bit too advanced for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was made on a PC-88 or something like that though.

Hope you enjoy the silliness. Have a chiptunetastic holiday!

Posted in Complete Albums | 2 Comments »

Chill Out with Anime Ambiance

Friday, December 15th, 2017

How you been?

In the past three weeks my computer died, my three-year visa was denied (leaving me with another shitty one-year visa) and my body decided to revolt against me (again), striking me with what I think might be a recurring bout of atypical pneumonia.

So what I’m saying is, I don’t want to hear any complaints about tonight’s musical selection. It’s my shitty month and I’ll listen to ambient soundtracks of anime if I want to.

Fumio Miyashita – Hino Tori Uchu-Hen
Like I said, it’s been a rough week, so I’m going to be real with you, I had no idea what Hino Tori Uchu-Hen was when I bought this album. I also had no idea who Fumio Miyashita was. I bought this album solely because of the back cover, which lists about a billion different digital synthesizers and computers as the instruments used.

That’s usually a guarantee for me that I’ll dig something on the album. And I certainly found a lot to dig here. Some of this is straight-up ambient background music you’d expect to find in a mid-80s anime, but it also diverges a bit into Tangerine Dream sequencer territory (aka my favorite territory) as well as some more traditional-sounding pieces that sound like they were performed on an organ but were no doubt performed on a synthesizer doing its best impersonation of an organ. It even has a pop song on it, the not-at-all-bad-but-entirely-forgettable “Showers of Gold.”

And it’s not about that kind of golden shower you pervs.

This is good chill out music for me. I just had this on loop for about two hours yesterday while I organized my iTunes library and tried not to think about the fact that I couldn’t breathe.

It turns out that the composer, Fumio Miyashita, was somewhat well-known for his chill out music. Even my boyfriend owns a couple of his CDs, which he listens to when he wants to, surprise, chill out. According to him, people used to go to his concerts to lay down and just relax (with no drugs I swear – it’s Japan).

I want to get more of his stuff, and that shouldn’t be too hard as it turns out that a lot of his anime soundtracks are pretty easy to come by here. I’m not interested too much in his “relaxation music” though. I like my new age in small doses for the most part.

What I do want to dig into more is his prog history though. In the seventies the dude was in two very influential Japanese prog acts; The Far East Family band and Far Out. Their stuff is slightly less easy to find, which is a bummer. But what I heard online I dig. It’s weird as hell. Turns out Kitaro was in that group. Did they invent new age prog? I don’t know if that would be a good thing or not.

I should also probably mention what this is the soundtrack to. Hino Tori Uchi-Hen is an animated movie from 1987, based on the mange by the same name. The manga was the work of Osamu Tezuka, who is best known as the creator of Astro Boy. Like I said, I never saw the movie, but if it’s half as chill as this, maybe I should check it out.

It’s kind of hard to get into anime when you live in Japan, as almost none of it has English subtitles. It’s like that episode of the Twilight Zone with the dude and the books, but with way more anime boobs.

Oh, one more thing happened this week. I met Hideki Matsutake, aka Logic System, aka the guy who played the sequencers on all the best YMO albums as well as a dozen other classic Japanese techno-pop records.

I’m on the left.

I was quite excited. Although if I knew I was going to get a picture with him, I would’ve rocked my pink tie.

Posted in Complete Albums, Fumio Miyashita, soundtrack | No Comments »

Save Me Japanese Nu-Jazz Rock Rap Fusion

Sunday, December 3rd, 2017

What the fuck do I say?

This is the year that just keeps on shitting. The President of the United States of America is a recluse who sits behind his phone, tweeting out racist propaganda to encourage ethnic cleansing, while the GOP work in the middle of the night to pass criminal “tax” codes that work to dismantle health care and destroy the global climate. The rest of the world needs to pass economic sanctions on the US for human rights violations.  The citizens of America to brush up on their carpentry skills and build some motherfucking guillotines. I feel like that’s the only way that things are going to get any better at all.

In the meantime here’s a 16-year-old song that perfectly defines how I feel right this minute.

Boom Boom Satellites (Featuring Chuck D)
Your Reality’s A Fantasy But Your Fantasy is Killing Me (Coldcut V.Steinski Going Under Mix)
Light My Fire (Live At Fuji Rock)
It’s been a bit over a year since we lost Michiyuki Kawashima to brain cancer and to be honest, I had to take a break from the group’s music for a bit. Some of it, especially Shine Like a Billion Suns and their final EP, just made me too emotional. I strongly associate Boom Boom Satellites with some of my greatest moments in my life, from the Moby concert I went to on my 20th birthday where they were the opening act, to my first visit to Japan where I gorged on their music while traveling the side streets of the city that would eventually become my home.

For me, Boom Boom Satellites are an encapsulation of every kind of music I’ve ever liked. Part hard rock, dub, big beat, synthpop, hip-hop and even progressive rock. They did it all and they did it all well.

I like all their albums, but the one I’ve probably re-visited the least is their 2001 sophomore effort Umbra. It definitely qualifies as a “difficult second album” with diversions into downbeat electronica and even some jazz that are honestly hard to digest at times.

The album does have a standout shoulda-been classic though, “Your Reality’s A Fantasy But Your Fantasy is Killing Me.” Rad live drums and programmed beats accompany guitar noise and dissonant sax. It’s cyberpunk jazz serving as a backdrop for a viscous rap by none other than Chuck motherfucking D. Segueing from nearly nonsensical word association to blistering verses attacking white liberals who want to pretend everything is okay alongside black leaders who aren’t trying hard enough, it’s even more fucking relevant and brutal now than it was when it first came out.

Umbra is not available in the states, but the song is. You can get it on the 19972016-19972007 Remastered greatest hits collection, which is available on most digital storefronts. I recommend that entire album, it’s a fantastic, epic-length introduction to a band everyone needs to recognize.

Another album that isn’t on iTunes is the group’s Remixed compilation, which features a fantastic remix of the track by Coldcut, which is the version I’m sharing here tonight.

From what I can tell, there are no live recordings of the track, but it was often incorporated into the group’s live performances of another track called “Light My Fire,” where they would take the beats and heavy guitars of that song and play Chuck’s rap over them. The combination worked wonderfully, and the fierce nature of the group’s always intense live shows made the rhymes by Chuck sound even more brutal.

Annoyingly, no live version of “Light My Fire” ever made it to a proper BBS live album. However, it made it to plenty of their live DVDs, all of which I’ve ripped and converted to MP3s. The live version I’m sharing tonight is from the group’s 2005 Fuji Rock performance. It’s rad as shit.

In the interests of my own mental health, my next post might be nothing but Japanese new age/ambient music and I apologize in advance.

Posted in Boom Boom Satellites, remixes | 2 Comments »