Aging Schoolhouse

This week the Sonic Zone Remix Competition saw the siege of the Robotnik Bracket, round 1. For the round, entrants had to remix their previous selected source material, as well as the material of the opponent. As for the storyline, cutscenes explaining the current plot points of the tournament are not available as of this writing. OLRmageddon offered a tantalizing premise for this month’s theme: with “Non-Famous Composers” participants are urged to remix tunes from the unsung heroes of video game music. For a bonus, people could also include the Wilhelm scream so long as they actually do a remix to include it in.

SDCompo further invested in its revisal of it rules by allowing other VSTs that contestants could use. Specifically FreeAlpha, TAL-Elek7ro, MrTramp2, and Delay Lama are available as weapons of choice. Battle of the Bits held a number of compos of its own, including one noting the seventh anniversary of the site. Other competitions held had a variety of colorful titles, including “Pixelz in teh morning coffee” in which pixel art variations of a cup of Joe were created, and the “haven’t tracked in a week, so this week has tracking”, which expectedly features tracker files. 

LLCompo: Battle 18 came across a vast “Wealth”, and according to the ASCII in the description was passed along from one Kirby to another. The round’s introduction narrated by WVI also contained background music by WVI consisting of he own voice. As noted by the intro, the turnout was smaller than usual but nevertheless filled with regulars. Some entrants chose to enumerate their wealth, like liquidwind’s epic lo-fi “75 trillion dollars” and the introduction’s more modest “$18”. Sear on the other hand simply claimed “All of It” before laying down frantic electronics. On the other side of the coin, Delphinus encountered a beggar asking “Spare Some Change” amidst piano, strings, record scratches and a sample of Pink Floyd’s “Money”.

JHCompo on Tuesday hit a milestone with its 100th round, and thus started off with a composite of previous intro narrations before establishing the “Space Station” theme. chunter entered the “Moog Space Century” both honoring the compo and Robert Moog’s birthday. Tomapella’s track brings to mind the brass-heavy electronica of Blast Corps. Kay Faraday brought out a frenetic dance pulse reminiscent of a Mortal Kombat session. Cooling things off was jmr, who offered some of his guitar stylings for an “Abandoned Colony”. Finally swordofdestiny seemed to bring in elements of dubstep, and asked the other entrants to name the song his chord progression came from. 

Thursday’s OHC got a bit old fashioned when it revealed its “Old-School” theme for the night. A-zu-ra apologized for the track he cobbled together whilst waiting in line for Fanime, and promised to make it up later. dusthillguy promptly followed this up with his own “Nads” adequately fitting the theme by using an old sample of my voice. Draconiator spun out a pun by stating that the schoolhouse is crumbling due to its age, and created a brief groove. A number of entrants went the way of hip hop for the night; Obtuse rapped over a funky backing track and live bass; A2Z settled on a kickdrum for rather long time and dropped chordal stabs; and Acuity spat rhymes into what sounded like a paper cup. At the end of the listening party Evdog took a left turn with rapid-fire 12-bar blues, asking “…so this is old school… right?”