ella guro

wow, thanks! i didn't expect anyone out there to have this track. i think i have all of the other ones from IMC10, but it's nice to know someone else out there still has them. i can't believe how long all of this was ago! it was literally more than half my life ago, lol.

i wasn't super active then (also different name) but i was around back in 2002/2003. i haven't been around per se in recent years, but i have been thinking about doing a remix or two (or perhaps a remix album) at some point in the future

hey - i know this was a long time ago but i'm just wondering if any of these mirrors are still up anywhere? herograw's .rar file download seems to work but nothing else. i was specifically looking for the track "Jenova Rose" by Wintermute from IMC10 because i used to have it and it mysteriously disappeared. it looks like it was on one of these archives though, just not the one herograw has. also i have all the rest of the tracks from IMC10, including the ones that appear to have been missing as of 10 years ago. dunno if anyone cares, but if they do i can still upload them.

hey! in case any of y'all are curious what i'm up to musically these days, i just released an album called SCRAPS yesterday on bandcamp. it's pay what you want. it's sort of a cleansing exercise, to let go of old material that i'm never gonna finish but thought people might like to hear in a little sampler platter-type format. a lot of it is cleaned up demos and stuff of when i was more active on here (from around 2002-2005) - and there are several bits and pieces of videogame music arrangements. probably the most substantial/complete one is .on another note, i have a soundcloud page with a couple of themes i did for games recently (and a better-encoded version of a remix on here) here: http://soundcloud.com/ella-guro and i also now have a facebook page where you can keep track of my music escapades: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ella-Guro/595685913775299?ref=hl thank you! enjoy!

an obvious mention, but Boards of Canada are great. Geogaddi is my favorite album of theirs.

apogee was my life when i was younger! DOS games were the only real games i owned for a long time. i'd say my favorites are (having gone back and played these pretty recently): 1. Commander Keen or 2. (the other two Duke 1 episodes definitely have their moments, but aren't as consistent as the first)3. also, honorable mention to (this is ignoring the obvious choices of Wolf 3D, Duke 3D etc) oh, right. Jill of the Jungle isn't an Apogee game. well, whatever.

my post was a bit flippant, so sure. i think a dominant trend with people who are interested in technology of any kind is that there's a heavy degree of gear fetishism that comes with it. this makes sense, because they're excited by new advances in technology allowing them to do something they couldn't before. and i mean, it wouldn't try to argue that having access to extremely powerful recording/sequencing equipment on any computer isn't an enormous boon for creative people, because it is. hence the link to Björk saying that if there's no soul in electronic music it's because no one put it there, and not it's not the tools' fault. it's been said before but computer music really is the new "punk". so i'm all for that, 100% what bothers me is when i feel like the engineers are taking over the creative process. for me, personally, because i'm much more of an emotional than a technical person, i get tired of the constant gear talk that goes around electronic music-making circles. i like exploring new tools a lot, but it's very much secondary to the music-making process, to me. i've been shown a few high-end plugins that a lot of people use, and messing around them made me extremely nervous. why? one was that i felt i had to be an engineer to actually understand what i was doing. but ignoring my incompetence, i mostly felt they were doing all the work for me. and the most important part of making music, for me, is the process of exploring and building the sounds i have from scratch, so that i can form some kind of unique sound for what i'm doing. if the sound is already heavily defined for me, it feels like i'm just following a template. and i don't find that enjoyable - that's not why i do music. i know that other people are fine with music like that, and i have no problems with that. but i often feel like the tools are more built for a more left-brained approach towards composition than they are towards an open one. i mean, i get anxious about using a lot of sequencers because these days because i feel like they're built for pushing me towards making a certain type of music. even the ones that are supposed to allow you to do all kinds of different things. and i know you can make any kind music with FL or Reason or whatever, but i don't think it's a complete coincidence that the majority of the music that gets made with those tools sounds similar. what sounds good also is a huge matter of subjectivity - i have a mix on this site with a sound i really enjoy, but a lot of people think it sounds horrible. and i'm not really in a place to say they're wrong or i'm right, but i wasn't going to not make it just because i thought some people wouldn't like it. and i'm also very much a fan of The Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" album, for example, which has an extremely blown out sound that would be any engineer's nightmare. or Sleater-Kinney's " ". i approach sound more like sound-painting - how well does the sound realize the world that the composer is trying to achieve? and it bothers me that some people try to marginalize that approach, like it's overly pretentious or it doesn't exist, because that's the whole reason i'm doing music in the first place. i agree that chiptunes are a fad right now. i probably am as tired of them as you are. but fads based around a certain "sound" have been going on since the beginning of popular music.

http://youtu.be/ldP7I3OfQYU#t=3m44s i agree with the premise of the article that we've fetishized the technology to a huge degree at the expense of the actual compositions

My two cents: do lots of work, find a niche, find people you connect with, make friends, be as persistent as possible, be positive, keep in contact with people as much as you can. It's not easy (and I'm definitely not there yet) but it's certainly very doable, and absolutely worth your time if it's what you really want to do. I mean, in general, if you really want to do something, don't let anything or anyone stop you from doing it. If you don't really want to do it, then that's another thing. But even when it is true that some people are luckier than others, it's never helpful to make excuses.

I have an expo pass, so I'm sure I will see some of you all there!

...sucks. but yes I think it has a lot to do with the cultural climate videogames have developed around, as well as how young they are.

anything this guy drums in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_White_(drummer)

I just discovered this thread from some random browsing, so I thought I might add some thoughts (since the OP asked me for them) It is interesting to think about the place things like game remixes will occupy in the future. What purpose do remixes serve? Are they always artistically subjugated to original music because of nostalgia factor heavily weighing in? Why would you do a really weird, crazy interpretation of a well-known theme instead of doing weird, crazy music of your own? Now that it's possible to be heard and in some cases make a living doing original music for games, why spend a lot of time and energy rearranging other people's music? Will a place like OCR just become a launching point for people wanting to do original music? Though it is much easier to get exposure for original music now than it was when OCR was in its infancy, I don't think there's any danger in remixes or rearrangements becoming less relevant, or whatever. Though there is often a higher degree of risk/excitement in original music, arranging can also be exciting and interesting. I think a lot of it is about recontextualizing past experiences, or seeing well-known tunes from a new angle. Of course some of it is just that there are some really fuckin' great melodies that are in danger of going unnoticed because of a thing's obscurity, or being ignored just for being in a game even when they are more compositionally interesting than a lot of other things. Game music especially has occupied a pretty unique space in the world, because the technology of older games necessitated doing a kind of music that hadn't exactly existed before that point. And that's rad. The more people see how truly unique and important game music has been, the better. Coming back to the thread topic, it's a little hard for me to separate nostalgia from interpretation, because I feel like they both come into play most of the time. Nostalgia does have the tendency to make people just wanna revisit their experiences verbatim instead of doing anything new with them. So it can be a barrier to creativity and/or open-mindedness. But it also often the source of inspiration, the reason why you were moved enough to do an arrangement in the first place.

on a related note, The Shizz had a Top 30 NES soundtracks poll awhile back, the results of which are definitely worth checking out: http://good-evil.net/features/good-evil-presents-the-shizz-top-30-nes-soundtracks

A few months ago I played this for some old housemates of mine. Midway through, the girlfriend of one of them turned to him and half-whispered "this doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard before." I think that's probably the best compliment I've ever received.