Best Of The Week: (Top 5)
1. ThursdayBloom-Siberia III: Seeming to form a more epic journey each week, this week ThursdayBloom takes the strings out of the background and gives them the spotlight, form a startling set of melodies and harmonies that are as beautiful as they are genuinely full of distraught. An astonishing piece of work, and my favourite of his tracks to have entered the challenge so far.
For Fans Of: Epics, Feeling Cold, Serials.
2. Nuro Z- Chapter Three-Tonight, She Dies: Returning after a very-much-noticed-by-me absence for a week, Nuro Z returns once again on astonishing form, this week round focusing on vocal manipulation and a wider range of sampling techniques to add weight and power to his piece. As part of the suite, this track drags you in deeper and deeper into depressed and murky smog. The mid-section spoken word section is once again delivered with astonishing skill, building tension and despair until the track stumbles out into a set of samples and slowed down chorus.
For Fans Of: Nuro Z's other two Chapter tracks, Anything.
3. Spaceman Fantastiques- Setting Sail WIP (Guitar Demo): For a guitar demo, this sounds outstanding. All too often, the inclusion of guitars with chiptune sounds either forced, a novelty, or both. Few have managed to successfully add the two together in a cohesive way that works. Something Hunter Quinn once said to me sums it up perfectly (and I hope he doesn’t mind me paraphrasing him here), but all too often is sounds almost as if the two mediums are playing separate songs, and as such leaves the listener with a slightly disordered and disjointed mess to take in. However, here SF manages to drag the two together like glue; you could easily swap the guitar melodies with the chip ones and with a little change in emphasis make them work just as well. That level of cohesion takes some skill, luck, or a large amount of fore thinking, and given the level of quality in SF’s other pieces of work, the two of those which it is are pretty clear. If this is a demo, I’m extremely excited to hear the final piece!
For Fans Of: Noisewaves, Mr Keenes' exploits, Roboctopus' guitar-oriented chip work.
4. Dataline-Nothing: Minimalist beats and glitches clip and clop behind a sea of synth scales to give the impression of drifting, with samples laying down a hand latter to keep the listener entranced. There are a lot of great minimalist pieces that seem to be churned out in this challenge, so it takes a lot for one to stand out from the crowd so blatantly whilst sticking to its guns throughout, making this a great piece with both an integral vibe and a perfect execution.
For Fans Of: Half of the WeeklyBeats entries, Health remixes, Glitchy things.
5. AlexOgre-Empty Words: Another week another twisting progressively structured trance/house track from new-kid-titan AlexOgre. Now with more funk. I’d list the reasons that this is good, but they are the same reasons he has been consistently stunning each week, and I dislike reiteration. So instead, just listen to it, yeah?
For Fans Of: The other half of the WeeklyBeats entries, Unce, Bleep.
Honourable Mentions.
DrumurBoy-Desfuse: Foreboding and extremely atmospheric, DrumurBoy manages to construct an entire imaginary world inside the space of a few chords and soft melodies.
Dylannau-Pizza Horse: Weird sampling mayhem which flirts with minimalism and trance without letting up its eerie and rather unsettling atmosphere for a second.
Ezkl-Elastic Black: A beautiful set of melodies that may at first seem a bit repetitive, but then flower into a strangely captivating concoction of harmonies and atmospheres that sways from bitter to sweet sounding just as luscious as the other, before finally returning to the original melody almost as affirmation that this track WILL be stuck in your head all day.
Freque-U, Robot: Crunchy LSDJ swagger shakes its boots with another great melody from the Freque’s mind.
Jiffypop23-M: Massive. (See what I did!? Though minimal would have been a better description. Minimal magic would have been the best but I’m not prepared to resort to such campness just yet)
Kedromelon- Desolate Time: A destructive set of samples arranged into a house fury with a beat hard enough to crush a skull.
Little-scale-Semi Professional Stalker (909 Samples): Hardstyle with a few claps. Just a few. Also a good amount of stunning melodies and glitchy madness.
Louis-Luciana I’m Still Hot (Pukpuk Remix): Glitchy dubstep remix of a song I don’t know, though it hits like a brick and has some great ideas in it, and about 20 megatons of energetic rage.
Ok Ikumi-AS21: Rising and falling gently and giving one hell of a trip as a result, Ok Ikumi shows another stunner and another side of his compositional dice
Seagull Chainsaw-Discuss/Disgust: Noise gives way to trip hop that creeps along with a solid beat and enough grooves to floor
cTrix of the Week:
Heaps Buzz:
Glitchy to the point of sounding schizophrenic before giving way to a pumping sped up maniacal rage and then a swaggering disjointed sway. Put together with Atari sounds, and as such sounding as hard and raw as a coconut in concrete, the more softer melodic moments (and by moments I do mean for about 3 seconds at a time) sound all the more fragile and powerful, which creates a great dynamic within the piece. Though the main drawing factor of this track has to be the catchiness; the very first section has been stuck in my head most of today. This was the type of track I’ve been waiting for cTrix to throw into the challenge, and now that he has I’m over the moon.
Tl;dr: Hard-hitting danceable Atari madness.
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