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IWADON: A Tribute to an Unsung Hero of Game Music - Friday 4:30 Jamspace
Jeriaska
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Registered User regular
Hi, this is Jeriaska, one of two speakers for the IWADON panel, taking place Friday at 4:30 at the PAX East Jamspace.
IWADON is a compilation of free videogame music covers in tribute to composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki -- iwadon on twitter. The musician has dedicated the past 20 years to creating memorable soundtracks for the Natsume game company, and IWADON is a celebration of his accomplishments.
The website Game Music 4 All is preparing more than 30 game covers (over 100 minutes of music) adapting tunes first heard on the Game Boy, NES, Super Nintendo and Xbox Live Arcade to all sorts of artistic interpretations. There will be jazz, classical, pop, rock and chiptune renditions of Iwatsuki's music, available online to stream on March 24 at iwadon.com.
The arrangements are performed by artists from the United States, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Sweden, Russia and other assorted locales. I am a correspondent for the website GameSetWatch and am helping out with research on the official website's copious liner notes, available in both English and Japanese. Our panel will investigate the history of Iwatsuki's music and introduce the participating artists.
They include Stemage of Metroid Metal, independent game composer Mattias Häggström Gerdt, Brazilian game cover band 8 Bit Instrumental and a number of other talented enthusiasts of videogames.
To hear more about the project as well as listen to a complete track by musician Kento Watanabe, you can visit the announcement post at Game Music 4 All. Music video installments featuring unabridged arrangements are scheduled to be posted once per day, leading up to PAX East.
IWADON is a compilation of free videogame music covers in tribute to composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki -- iwadon on twitter. The musician has dedicated the past 20 years to creating memorable soundtracks for the Natsume game company, and IWADON is a celebration of his accomplishments.
The website Game Music 4 All is preparing more than 30 game covers (over 100 minutes of music) adapting tunes first heard on the Game Boy, NES, Super Nintendo and Xbox Live Arcade to all sorts of artistic interpretations. There will be jazz, classical, pop, rock and chiptune renditions of Iwatsuki's music, available online to stream on March 24 at iwadon.com.
The arrangements are performed by artists from the United States, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Sweden, Russia and other assorted locales. I am a correspondent for the website GameSetWatch and am helping out with research on the official website's copious liner notes, available in both English and Japanese. Our panel will investigate the history of Iwatsuki's music and introduce the participating artists.
They include Stemage of Metroid Metal, independent game composer Mattias Häggström Gerdt, Brazilian game cover band 8 Bit Instrumental and a number of other talented enthusiasts of videogames.
To hear more about the project as well as listen to a complete track by musician Kento Watanabe, you can visit the announcement post at Game Music 4 All. Music video installments featuring unabridged arrangements are scheduled to be posted once per day, leading up to PAX East.
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If you like music, like Jeriaska said above, you can check out the great Piano Arrangement of a track from our upcoming compilation IWADON from vimeo here. http://vimeo.com/10218204
Hope to meet some VGM fans while I am out in Boston, I will finally be among a huge contingent of video game music fans and I can't wait!
IWADON: Spanky's Quest Boss
Footage from the movie was taken at the recent Game Developers Conference, where Crashfaster played at the One-Button Games festival organized by Kokoromi. This arrangement can be compared with the source material, found on YouTube video "Spanky's Quest (GameBoy version) Bosses + Ending". The compilation website will be linking to all of Iwatsuki's tracks in the liner notes.
This is Mike from 8bitartist.com -- I provided some illustrations for the compilation site (also seen in the promo videos). I won't be able to attend the panel, but I'll be there in spirit. Psyched to see the project come to fruition.
On a personal note, TONS of cool music has come out of this; if you're a fan of game music or you've just played the games, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Iwatsuki is an amazing composer, and the diversity of the cover bands makes it accessible to fans of a bunch of different genres.
Jeriaska and Genoboost: hope you guys have a blast at the panel!
Mike provided all the original artwork for the IWADON Tribute album. We met on designing Nobuooo, a Digg-style videogame music news aggregator, which is currently under construction. This time Mike has illustrated four female protagonists from Natsume games: Ruby from Omega Five, Annie from Wild Guns, Kunoichi from Ninja Warriors, and Sayo from Pocky & Rocky. Two are shown below, weapons in hand.
The latest video featuring a full track from the compilation is Tatsuhico's remix of the end credits theme from XBLA shooter Omega Five.
IWADON: Road to the Future - Tatsuhico Mix
Tatsuhico is a multimedia artist based in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He took all the photographs shown in the video, which will also appear in a slideshow streaming on the official site on the 24th. Iwatsuki stopped by Vimeo last night to favorite the video shortly after it appeared online, which is pretty exciting.
Cheers!
//CUCKOO
IWADON: No Weather Who You Are
Below are some liner notes for the arrangement as well, which will be appearing on the official site on Wednesday:
Alexander Piterskiy was born in the summer of 1986 in a place no longer on the map, Leningrad, USSR. (These days it's called Saint-Petersburg, Russia.) By the age of 13 he had gotten the idea that music could be his way of his life. Like many children that age he dreamed of having a guitar and a puppy, but he was getting high marks in physics and math, so his parents gave him only the puppy.
Luckily music stores are plentiful in Saint-Petersburg. Visiting them from time to time, Alexander taught himself to play simple melodies on every instrument he could find, though he shied away from trumpets. One day he was caught trying to steal an upright piano from the store. Alexander spent about five hours in the police station before being released because the officer decided he was not clever enough to constitute a serious menace to society. Having demonstrated the extent of his desparation to create music, his parents finally bought him his first bass guitar. It was not long before he acquired an acoustic guitar, harmonica, a bongo, accordion, flute and toy piano by Yamaha.
In 2008 Alexander graduated from Polytechnic University. He celebrated by buying an American Fender Stratocaster HSS and getting a tattoo of J.S. Bach playing the contrabass. By then the puppy had become a big dog and succumbed to illness.
Alexander's music has always been notable for the diversity of its styles and genres. He has composed for two performances by Eugene Radkevich, one of which, Solaris (based on Stanislaus Lem’s novel), can still be seen playing in a small community theater. He regards Nobuo Uematsu as his musical teacher and finds the original soundtrack to Final Fantasy VIII an unattainable ideal. "Many times I was inspired simply listening to the music of Uematsu-san," he has said. "That's what I'd like to compose but cannot... so far". Since October of 2008 he has been was working at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in the city of Prague in the Czech Republic. The tracks he composed during that time have formed the bulk of his compilation Praha 8 Za Vodárnou 1, which can be heard on Bandcamp.
Having you onboard is definitely awesome, also can't wait to see your "panel" as well, if you can call it that. The chiptune 8 show, that should be epic. Think you'll be playing your IWADON cover there?
Anyway, folks are excited to see the panel, I think it will be extremely informative for new VGM fans and veterans alike!
For anyone interested in seeing what the talk is all about, 34 tracks of arranged videogame music are currently streaming on IWADON.com.