The Stunning Truth

This past week was home to a multitude of compos, bringing artists together and promoting growth for all those involved. The World Warrior Remix Royale reached the voting stage for round two of the Shoryuken Bracket, bringing out a trio of Street Fighter remixes. DusK rocked with an undertow of ambience; Main Finger paired double bass with heavy funk beats and scratches; and Sir_NutS stuck to his 80s electro vibe complete with accented piano chords. The end of the week promises to bring further fun when the Sonic Remix Competition begins, considering the many beloved compositions of the Sega franchise. 

Chipmusic.org held a number of competitions and showed a bit of innovation in a strict sense of the word. For the Chiptune Battle Challenge, Entrant A creates a tune that the Combatant B battles by playing off of that initial musical idea. The resulting track is then countered by Entrant A and so on, continued in brackets. This compo concept was innovated upon with the creation of the Weekend Battle Challenge, taking it further by incorporating themes for each battle, suggested by others and thrown into a hat. The organizer took pride in the fact that the Challenge uses an actual hat and actual strips of paper representing themes.

LLCompo: Battle 12 imbued the week’s “Dungeon” theme with the spirit of Easter this past Sunday by way of an ASCII bunny. As usual the listening party’s introduction was put up by Kay Faraday and narrated by WVI. The round was welcomed by its gang of regulars including Saif’s guitar noodling, PowerFail’s session of metal and WVI’s own lo-bit pop. As the pleasantries wrapped up, a technical snafu occurred causing one entry to appear twice: Jerkwater’s pulsing “MindDungeon” is perhaps one of those dance tracks that should be listened to more than once. 

JHCompo on Tuesday guided everyone “Home at Last” for the night and eased them to relax. Clunkst worked the piano and chimes to a set of harmonies befitting the title “the land of perpetual excitement”. irrelevnt fell asleep for half of the compo, but managed to put the remaining 60 minutes to good use for an acoustic guitar and vocal entry. Kay Faraday went into “Korby’s House” punctuating familiar synth stabs with silence. After running into trouble uploading his track Clockwerk presented his six minute long foray into IDM leaning toward break beats. Finally SonicThHedgog entered as a distant last, and urged other entrants guess his source material.

Thursday’s OHC prompted contestants to look back upon the past with its “Reflection” theme. Fusion2004 started things off by reflecting on a chipified chord progression and asking listener to guess which one it is. A slew on entries followed, a great deal of which mentioned reflections and mirrors in the track title. One that differed from the pack was Starshine’s inexplicably titled “pepperoni” that goes from mellow electronica to flat-out rock in less than a minute. sci chose to reminisce on past compo experiences while Arcana noted that his previous submission was labeled “reflection.mp3”. At the end of the night Beat Match replicated the chords from a Deadmau5 song and produced dubstep with increasingly abrasive gain, ironically revealing “The Stunning Truth” just as everyone went deaf.