New Kojimatic album - "Press Start to Play"
Insert your cartridges and boot up your old consoles - here is a soundtrack straight from the gaming sessions of your childhood! The latest release of my music project Kojimaic (which has been renamed from Kenji Kojima for this occasion) "Press Start to Play" is pure chiptune goodness with catchy melodies that could come right out of a 80's or 90's console game.
The 5-track album is now available on my Bandcamp page at https://kojimatic.bandcamp.com and will is available on all major streaming and download platforms (like Apple Music, Spotify or Amazon).
Here's some trivia about the album:
- Inspiration for these songs obviously came from chiptune music and soundstracks of 80's and early 90's computer game music. The pixel artwork of the cover is a nod to that. The song titles also roughly resemble a game soundtrack.
- No real instruments, no vocals, just MIDI tracks with chiptune plugins - this project reduces music to the bare minimum. I always preferred working with real instruments, but here, not being restricted by my instrument skills when composing actually resulted in a lot of freedom in composing. It also sped up the process a lot, as these songs were much easier to mix since I didn't have to worry with several different recordings, instruments and vocals for each song.
- I actually never liked using MIDI that much and found working with it somewhat cumbersome. I thus used MIDI rarely before, mostly with plugins that simulated real instruments (like the cello in "Owaru Sekai" from my album "Atarashii Sekai"). When I started researching chiptune music, little did I know that it would spark a huge amount of inspiration. I had a ton of fun composing these songs and I think it shows.
- The first song I did for the project (that song later became the title track "Press Start to Play") was composed almost exactly one year ago in December 2018. After a longer break, I returned to the project in late summer and autumn 2019 to compose the other four songs. The last song I created for the album ("Cutscene") was actually composed just two weeks before the release and within three days.
- A lot of 80's and 90's game music makes use of weird time signatures and rhymthms. While this isn't prevalent in a lot of the songs from this album, "Cutscene" actually alternates between 3/4 and 4/4 signatures, with the main melody ending with a bar of 4/4 and then switching back to 3/4. You can find a few cases where a beat is added or removed in some of the other songs as well.
- The release date December 14 is not random. Three years ago on this date, my previous album "Atarashii Sekai" was released, so Happy Birthday to that album!
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