Freedom of Choice

The past week proved to a playground of options as far as where and when musicians could join compos. Battle of the Bits in particular held a fair number of competitions in the past few weeks with a variety of themes: some of the rounds had odd titles, such as “reliable internet broadband”, “what the hell botbrs” and "everyone vote on this". Perhaps the most specific was “If you are the owner of this website and weren’t”,  apparently referencing the domain snafu of the previous week. The song names continued this trend, as seen in Svetlana’s “I forgot how to make music” and Chip Champion’s “I found it finally”. 

People Remixing Competition 220 reconstructed science with sggod89’s selection of Portal 2 for entrants to remix. The source material melds an ambient soundscape with dance rhythms, opening up many possibilities for interpretation. OneUp sampled the praised “lemon speech” from the game and went forward using breakbeats. evktalo’s arrangement used the source’s bassline to the exclusion of other elements; he also noted the irony of remixing the game considering it causes him motion sickness. Zerothemaster went for rap vocals and an 8-bit asthetic, but decided against listing the lyrics in the description. Trism played around with a musicbox and un-tiss while sggod89 dropped a bonus entry of his own. 

LLCompo started things off with a narration by WVI, who admitted to still being sloshed from the last week’s round. Rather than announcing the theme of the night in a straightforward manner, he related an increasingly unsettling anecdote about a “Blackjack Dealer”. The Sonic Zone Remix Competition hit round three of the Robotnik Bracket revealing an interesting twist of fate: Brandon Strader’s guest vocalist Wildfire from a previous bout would go on to be Brandon’s direct competitor. Both of their tracks were in the running while Gario and Syllix dueled on in a narrowing field of four entries total.

JHCompo on Tuesday ventured on the motorway, tying in the weekend’s summer festivities with a “Road Trip”. Tomapella was the first to blurt out “WOO YEAH” and went to work building a talkbox-infused chillout track. chunter crash-cymbaled his way in and did some extended soloing for the occasion. InvisibleObserver finally removed his invisibility cloak in time to return to JHCompo under the swagger of an electrohouse beat. irrelevnt admitted to “Road Tripping Ballz” but nevertheless delivered a bass-and-whistle tune panned out to maximum efficiency. Finally Maraki started his engines in a sea of chippy blurps and skidded off the roadway by way of four-on-the-floor. 

Thursday’s OHC noticeably was missing its organizer for the night, and so it came as little surprise that theme was “Free for All”. With that in mind, BrandonS fooled around with Mellotron tape loops to produce a pre-manufactured arrangement, which he found to be ironic. TheMisterCat incidentally played with pad sounds on the keyboard, using nearly the same core approach as Brandon but outputting a completely different result. Roseweave recorded a new version of John Cage’s composition “4:33”, but defied the original by including a deliberate musical action i.e. beatboxing.

MandraSigma was the first of many entrants to reference the theme in the song title, as his “Anarchist Hipster” served as a synonym of sorts. Other included seventhelement’s “Freedom is a Competition”, A2Z’s “Loose” and CJthemusicdude’s humorous “Fwee for Soundfwonts”. Duosis made a rare appearance sampling a handful of clips, and used the final chord of Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother Suite” as a pitched instrument. At the end of the party munchi sent off “Tribal Loops” in an effort to expand drum and bass into the realm of drums and loops.