Composing for the Weekend

Doubles Dash Compo 16 happened to fall on both the eve of Memorial Day weekend and the start of Blip Festival 2012. Perhaps not coincidentally the theme was “Roadtrip” at a time when people were likely traveling to celebrate the holiday. The turnout was slimmer than normal: DucksUnlimited and Neon Jalapeño joined forces to create “The Road to Perdition” displaying Duck’s vocals. The track is mostly laidback electronica until a sudden rhythmic shift near the end. Toward the end of the holiday break LLCompo: Battle 19 ran into a small implosion at SolidComposer, leading the round to migrate to another site for the party.

Dwelling of Duels received its entries on the half shell as “TMNT Month” reached its end. In addition to DoD’s usual rules, the month also offered that those with the highest ranked entries would go on to be part of the OverClocked ReMix project Shell Shocked. Meanwhile People’s Remixing Competition 219 also offered some album inclusion goodness by challenging participants to remix Gunstar Heroes for the Be Aggressive project. Both Danger Hawk and sggod89 were up to the task, and in a change of form the winner was decided by the project group rather than through a vote. 

The Sonic Zone Remix Competition saw round 2 of the Sonic Bracket bear remixed fruit. Unusually, one of the tracks came with a set of lyrics: Phonetic Hero’s “PseudoMeltdown” features the vocal stylings of Xarnax42. OLRmageddon on the other hand paid tribute to the lesser known composers of the video game world. For bonus points, the entrant needed to include the Wilhelm Scream in some way. Pinkos Anon obliged by putting the scream into a sampler and letting it run the gamut of pitches alongside the music of Star Control 2. He did however use other instruments besides the scream, thus losing the challenge stipulated by XO that would have led to a multitude of prizes including a custom forum title.

JHCompo on Tuesday brought things "Back to Basics" for its theme after I had teased at the many possible puns related to it being the 101th round. dusthillguy kept things simple by way of a mellow tempo and later dropped a beat. nikola welcomed the theme as it allowed him to put out a Game Boy tune using LSDJ. dskyndileg took a left turn by presenting a climatic showdown between two rivals, back by trance pads and guitar arpeggios. Due to a bit of awkward timing, Duosis uploaded an hip-hop “outro” before the actual final track of the night: irrelevnt worked up and down the piano scales and rocked out with stabs of “Apache”. 

Thursday’s OHC selected A2Z’s theme suggestion for the night: “Alone in the Woods” brought back compo memories as far back as the forest-themed round 51, nearly three years ago. dusthillguy started things off by puffing tobacco in the words, thereby avoiding a “smoking trees” pun. Obtuse appeared fresh off of his Blipfest experience to noodle away on bass and keyboard. Several people made of use of backward audio including sci’s mirrored vocal clips, IXI’s reversed cymbals, and Acuity’s choice to flip basically everything. At the end of the round Arcana found himself “Seeking the Way Through” using stock Logic Pro percussion sounds as he got out.