Tag Archives: classical

Octavators – Super Castlevania IV, The Remix Album

Today we bring you a guest post from The Octavators, with their cover album of Super Castlevania 4.

The Octavators is a music production company made up of Beyond Z (Joshua Hurwitz) and Vinnie Treux (Vincent Trudel), who have been making beats for the last twelve years. These talented beat makers provide instrumental music for TV shows, musicians looking for backing music to their lyrics, and video games. Their latest project is the soundtrack for the Japanese video game “Super Castlevania IV,” and they deliver the perfect background music to listen to while enjoying the game. As players battle Dracula and his minions, the soundtrack sets the mood and provides a nice auditory experience that will stick with you long after the game is over. “Demon Castle Dracula” has an eerie, spooky vibe, with a slow tempo and heavy bass. The creepy, slinky keyboard adds to the overall scary vibe, and the sound of “bones” clanging together is a nice touch. “Dracula’s Theme” starts out with the creepy sound of a chorus singing, mixed with synthesizers and piano, for am overall surreal feel. The guitars then come in to mix in with the chorus– perfect music for a horror movie. “Forest of Monsters” starts out with a funky drumbeat, and segues into an almost dance/rave type music style. The synthesizers are working overtime in this track, and the tune is both weird and catchy at the same time. Even though all of these songs have no lyrics, the instruments convey all that is being said in the songs– evil, scary, creepy vampires waiting to jump out at you as you go on your quest to destroy Dracula. The Octavators bring it on their latest, “Super Castlevania IV– The Remix Album.” The sound is creepy, the instrumentation wild and weird, and the sound exhilarating. The music sets the perfect mood for the video game, and the songs are catchy.

Friday Freakout: New Stern Fucking Zeit = CHIPTASTICALLY BRUTAL \m||m/

A lot of people tend to think that chiptunes are just a bunch of dancey dancey blipity bleep bloops. And to an extent it’s true (although some damn good dancey dancey blipity bleep bloops!!!). However, I know of at least two particular crazy German chiptuners who would reply to that line of linking with a solid, “F**K OFF!”, and they’d enforce it quite handily with their latest album:

Pathoscillator
by Stern Fucking Zeit

I’ve been a metalhand for at least a decade now,
long before I ever really got into chiptune. There’s something about the energy and the ferocity of metal that appeals to me even today (that and the badass  guitar solos, of course ;). So to discover an album that deftly blends both metal/hardcore/screamo stylings and chiptune (chipcore? chipmetal?) so damn well fills me full of \m||m/Even if the entirety of it is completely devoid of any metal guitar!!!  :O Although the indescribably brutal LSDj riffage does the trick JUST as well, which is quite the claim, I know! The album itself is a fair mix of both instrumentals and punishingly metal vocally led tracks, all interwoven with the perfect mix of thrash and melodic work to really make it catch. Either way, there is nothing about this album that isn’t METUL AS FUCK; it hits me right in my wheelhouse with the power of 10,000 pixelated Henry Rollins. And man, what I’d give to catch one of SFZ’s undoubtedly extremely high energy live shows; a mosh pit at a chiptune concert just sounds AWESOME. At any rate, all that I’m really trying to say with this meandering write-up (TOO… MUCH… METAL!! CAN… NOT… FOCUS!!), if you dig both metal and chiptunes but haven’t found anything yet that scratches both of those itches at once, THIS ALBUM IS FOR YOU.

\m||m/

A Classical Rendition of Mario Gangsterness

This shit is gangster in a whole new degree. I want to make up a word like classical-gangster but classical music is actually a time period not a style of music, so it wouldn’t really be an accurate portmanteau. A portmanteau is like a Mash-Up with words. Woah, knowledge dropping outta nowhere. Enough talk. Here’s the vid.

Gangsariocal. There I did it. Thanks to Chance Fisher for the link.

Hey, now would be a great time to Follow VideoGameDJ on Twitter!

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