FANGORIA ceased print production in 2015, but now, with new owners, the flagship macabre magazine is back! Releasing it’s first new issue in October, the hellish publication is continuing to ratchet up its involvement with the contemporary retro-horror community. Handpicking some of the best names in synthwave, darksynth and slasherwave for “HOLLYDOOM” is a conceptual soundtrack to the monstrous magazine itself.

From first listen I can tell you that none of the artists have pulled their brass-knuckled punches on this release. Each track feels inspired by the dark Old Ones themselves, conjuring exquisite images of dread and debauchery fit for only the likes an iconic publication such as FANGORIA!

Go grab a listen and subscription now! Top Tracks: OGRE – “Fugue,”  Carpenter Brut – “Mandarin’s Claws,”  John Carpenter – “Abyss,” Power Glove – “Adult Themes,” and Gunship feat. Corin Hardy – “Cthulhu”

Fangoria Presents: Hollydoom (Original Magazine Soundtrack) by Lakeshore Records

The reverberated bass ringing out, jangled clattering pads drenched in harsh tonality, rich with chorus and warmth. Then there is the drum break, a new order style breakdown creating a sparse tonal shift in the song’s direction. The beat wanders alone briefly before being soaked in a tidal wave of rock guitar riffs in the vein of top-gun bravado, mutated-obsessive-modular arpeggios, basses, sequences, pads. All of this escalates into the neo-retro inspired melodics at the heart of ‘The Bench’. Warm and neon-tinged analog synths, dystopian evolving melody lines engineered into nostalgic arrangements.

A pulsating sub bass undercuts the hardwired-sequences and stand-out Tron inspired melodies. This is an immersive experience aimed at bringing genuine analog character to the audio.

There are flashes of intensities, producing quick bursts of forceful light. The furthest part away in the distances rises slowly, takes prominence due to the overlapping motifs, translucent at first and then central to the mix.

A priority of shadows.

I’ve got another one for you from the Land of the Rising Sun, RetroFans… and oh, my stars and garters is it something. It’s a sizzling double-order of strange with a side of weird sexual stuff, heavily seasoned with Buddhist culture’s way more hardcore version of Hell than ours, and best of all… it’s Namco, so it’s also a pretty good game.

Yokai Dochuki is the fascinating story of a little boy who died and woke up in Jigoku, the Japanese Buddhist version of Hell. For the First couple of levels he carries a ghost with him, which he burps out before frantically praying at a shrine mere feet away as the ghost tears ass like she was the demons’ dad and they were playing with her power tools. Then he goes to see a VERY questionable mermaid show, peeps some pretty disappointing ogre tits, and finally has a chat with Buddha several stories above a lake of blood.

You know, let’s just start from a softer spot. This isn’t “jump in with both feet” shit.

In 1987, Namco had a fresh new deck of 16-bit arcade hardware called System 1, and they figured the best way to kick the tires was to go all-out on a domestic market platformer. Released in Japan in April of ’87, Yokai Dochuki (which literally translates to “Phantom Travel Journal,” a really casual label for a child’s jaunt through Hell) entered history as Namco’s very first 16-bit arcade platform game. While we never got it here in the Western world (and probably would have been aghast at some of the content), the game was reasonably popular among its domestic audience. Despite the fact that everything’s in Japanese and I have exactly zero idea what the fuck is happening ever, I really enjoy playing the PC Engine version I’ve been lucky enough to access. Yokai Dochuki is pretty challenging, and it boasts some really cool little bells and whistles considering its 1987 development/release. I found it completely by accident, but ended up learning a few things about Japanese culture, video game history… and sadly, what an ogre’s boobs look like.

Let’s talk about Jigoku for a second. It turns out that since Buddhism spread throughout Asia from Nepal and the Indian Subcontinent, “Jigoku” (地獄) is just the Japanese name for the Buddhist concept of Hell. Its original name in Sanskrit is “Naraka,” and it’s a huge set of horrible places. It’s not permanent like Christian Hell, but it still sucks big time. A soul also isn’t sent there due to judgment or punishment, but because of “accumulated karma.” So really, a being could wind up there seemingly randomly upon death… just like poor little Tarosuke has!

Fortunately for him, he can pretty much Hadoken at will, and when he’s first finding his Hell legs he walks around with a pet ghost tucked away. When confronted with a powerful demon, Tarosuke shouts something I don’t understand, and then the ghost flies into his mouth and he burps it back out. I’m not sure why that extra step is necessary, but no one seems the worse for it. While this ghost (which appears to be a little girl) whips the ever loving hot shit out of entire gangs of oni, Tarosuke waddles over to a shrine that’s conveniently just a few feet away.

Look at him. It’s 11 AM and he’s already in Hell and three sheets to the wind. He’s gonna get ghost juice all over this guy’s floor.

This type of showdown only happens twice (I think). Mostly it’s just you, Tarosuke, navigating the landscape of screaming living corpses and huge floppy-headed wizard dudes while you try to find the Buddha to have a chat. Again, I stress that my understanding of the spaces between is very limited due to the language barrier, but like most video games worth playing, you have to make a few stops first.

There’s also a store that shows up at the start of a few stages, where an old woman who just runs a shop in Hell will sell sake to a little kid. You can buy something early on that’s pretty useful: there’s an item that looks like the Black Lagoon creature’s foot, and it reduces the amount that water impedes your movement. Most of what the old woman sells seem to be life bar insurance items; that is to say, you auto-use them when you’re about to die and they pump a little gas into your tank. But yes, it seems that in Jigoku, just like in a real hustla’s life, only two things truly matter… money and power.

You’re either about that life… or you ain’t.  Or you’re n Hell and you’re a little kid. Whatever.

Yokai Dochuki actually has five endings, only two of which are remotely happy. The worst one has you end up staying right in Hell where you’re at. There’s also Hungry Ghoul World, which might sound cool to some of you horror hounds, but I want to stress that IT’S A WHOLE WORLD OF THAT SHIT, ALL THE TIME. Beast World is the ending I can reliably get, where you turn into sort of a pig-type creature that is content living in its own filth and eating almost anything. Since this most closely mirrors my actual real-life adult lifestyle, I am proud of my ability to reliably send Tarosuke there so we can be friends forever. One of the good endings has you waking up at your own funeral… and it kind of looks like they dressed you up like Princess Zelda. (I realize I’m probably being boorishly ignorant of East Asian funeral customs, but seriously, you even have a little Triforce tiara.)

Either way, it’s kind of like looking into a mirror.

To get to any of those endings, you’ve got to find Buddha. It’s what you do along the way that helps or hurts you. For instance, I know that to get one of the two happy endings, you can’t kill any enemies on Level 5. At some point early on you get a chance to gamble with some frogs and a zombie. Apparently, even though I think this is extremely fucking dope, Buddha does not.

Rock solid truth: Hell is just gangsta shit 24/7 and the scene is so Mad Max down here even Buddha gettin’ mad sendin’ high rollers to Beast World and shit.

In one of the last stages along the shittier path to reaching the Enlightened One, you have to go get… something from some lady who lives underwater. You ride a turtle down there, and she gives you some carnival barker routine… and then, in possibly the unsettling moment in the game, a set of pre-pubescent mermaids take the stage topless and shake their shit… MUCH TO TAROSUKE’S PRURIENT DELIGHT. To the point where HE CAN’T HELP FREQUENTLY LOOKING BACK AT YOU, THE PLAYER, TO SEE IF YOU’RE GETTING A LOAD OF THIS. I won’t comment further, it’s really not that bad in the grand scheme of things… but still, why does it have to be there? It makes that one level worse than anything in Splatterhouse.

They say that Hell is the impossibility of reason.

In another late level, you meet a grape-colored ogre woman who… has not aged well, and who has become the proud surrogate mother of an alarming number of crows. She wiggles, glances around, and mumbles while her crows look at you like you just got off the boat.

I will always hate birds in any video game because birds in video games simply thrive on defying all common sense in order to utterly destroy you. And yes. I saw them. Now you “get” to see them. JOURNALISM IN ACTION!

Don’t anthropomorphize crows at all. All you get is smarter, smugger crows.

After all these trials and tribulations, you finally ascend about a half-mile into the black sky above a neatly-contained lake/pool/whatever of blood. Apparently that’s where Buddha likes to chill and reflect on enlightenment… on a cloud structure that looks like a wobbly cat jungle gym teetering over Hell’s version of the hotel pool. If you were good (it’s fucking hard to be good in Hell), you go to Titty-Heaven or back to your weird family. If not, you get royally chumped or just turned into a pig. At least as the pig, it looks like you have a girlfriend or something, which is better than anything called Hungry fucking Ghoul World.

You’re on some Dr. Seuss set prop suspended above a gigantic stone bowl of hot blood, asking Buddha if he minds you clocking out of your karmic torment a few eons early since you’re a little kid. Moments of silence pass before he calmly condemns you to Hungry Ghoul World. The worst part? You know he made up his mind in the beginning and made you stand there just because he thought it was funny. And it was.

Ports were released for Japan’s Famicom and PC Engine systems in 1988. Once again, the Western world was left out of Namco’s bizarre yet well crafted piece of video game history. Later years not only saw Tarosuke show up in things like the PS2 game Namco X Capcom, but also saw Yokai Dochuki released for the Wii Virtual Console… yet again, Japan only.

PC Engine (left) and Famicom versions. The Famicom version includes a “Pious” counter so you can actively see how screwed you are. Being the angel-born miracle machine it is, the PC Engine clearly wins out on presentation… but both versions lose surprisingly little of the original feel.

Theories abound as to why the game never made it over here. One of my favorite ones is that it contains shit like the overt sexualization of children (even if those children are cartoon mermaids) and is also set exclusively within a very culture-specific concept that 9 out of 10 of us Westerners would have scratched our head at in the 1980s. It wasn’t until later that just over half of our young people would try so hard to be Japanese that it posed a potential safety risk. I digress; other theories insist that there WAS a version in the works for the English world, to be released on the American/Euro versions of the same two consoles. If you’re into emulation and you look around, there is a very good unofficial translation that goes by the name it’s suggested was planned for the Western cart… “Shadowland.”

Screaming crowds of damned souls; huge bean-headed mutant wizards; a giant woman who doesn’t seem to mind at all that you’ve invited yourself to bath time; the five-thousand dollar cat that was made using Granny’s refurbished Girl Scouts stem cell kit.

From a purely technical, play-the-video-game-you-pansy standpoint, Yokai Dochuki is pretty amazing. In 1987, it had a surprisingly open-ended play experience and was quite involved for an arcade title. It’s fun to play, and once you get the hang of how Tarosuke does his stuff it’s easy to wheel around and look like a badass. A lot of the enemies are creepy as shit; there’s a couple different beef-jerky skeleton dudes and a lot of monsters that are just horrible faces that float. Your environment changes a lot, and there’s not much downtime as you travel across Hell. The music is absolutely addictive, and I’m actually listening to a YouTube video of the main theme as I type. Graphically, Yokai Dochuki is everything a 16-bit heavy hitter should be. It’s colorful, detailed, and it conveys itself well as something that’s supposed to be both creepy and humorous.

I could just do without the mermaid child exploitation and the ogre tits, is all. Here’s the soundtrack!

Thanks for taking another walk to Japan with me, folks. We’ll have more for you in May, and as usual, if you’d like to ask me something or tell me about something I should write about, you can reach me via email or the NRW Gaming Facebook page.

Remember… when you’re going through Hell, keep going. Otherwise you might get turned into a horny, gluttonous pig.

10. SID64 – Future Nostalgia

Charles Michaud’s alter ego SID64 illustrates the potential that music has to tell stories. His experience composing film soundtracks no doubt lends itself to the best parts of his summer EP Future Nostalgia. The lead synth lines are the highlight, and they shine best on “Violet City”.

Twitter

Bandcamp

9.  Moondragon – Miramar

While many artists in theretrowave / synthwave / outrun scene focus on the atmosphere created by and created for driving, Moondragon looks to the skies. Even without the Bandcamp description, Troy Simpson’s music lives in the experience of liftoff. “Maneuvers” is the biggest standout track. 

Twitter

Bandcamp

8.  The Starfighter – After Hours

Dustin Fraser’s retro-inspired project The Starfighter is unique in that there is an understanding of the kind of power empty space can have in music. Just because every moment of a song can show you how fancy it can be with melody or effects doesn’t mean that is neccesarily always should. The open spaces are exactly what make After Hours memorable and groovy. The best song here is “Night Hawk”.

Facebook

Bandcamp

7.  Waveshaper – Solar Drifter

Solar Drifter opens with one of the most danceable songs of 2015, regardless of genre. While “Stellar Jupiter” is the best song on the EP, the supporting songs after it each bring a confident and catchy mix of sounds. This was one of the first new releases I heard this year, but it stuck with me since. 

Twitter

Bandcamp

6. Raydar – Evil Squad

If the first track on your release is titled “Satan”, you know exactly what you are doing. Evil Squad is as menacing as it is infectious from beginning to end. It manages to blend in several glitch hop elements throughout the five-track run. The best song is ” Lycanthrope”, which is set dead in the middle of the EP.

Twitter

Bandcamp

5. Sebastian Gampl – Winner

Winner is not homage to music from the 1980’s. Apart from the release date, it is music from the 1980’s.  I have a soft spot for vocal synthwave, and the vocals on this EP are a perfect match for the music, and the melodies are exceedingly catchy. “Without You” is the highlight here.

Soundcloud

Bandcamp

4. Robert Parker – Cardinal

Cardinal is an EP that knows it’s cool. It expertly weaves 80’s synths with 90’s nu-disco grooves and funky bass lines.  The production is clear and punchy, serving the funk and disco. The way Robert Parker weaves music from three decades, in particular on the track “Flashback”, shouldn’t be missed.

Soundcloud

Bandcamp

3. SelloRekT / LA Dreams – Sounds and Waves

Being “weird” in terms of sound is impressive in its own right. What is more difficult, however, is composing weirdly. The songs on SelloRekT / LA Dreams’ EP Sound and Waves utilize familiar sounds from the scene, but every single track contains surprising melodies and turns that you don’t expect the songs to take. The album leaves an impression of being strange while not always being able to tell exactly why. It’s the songwriting. The titular track, “Sounds and Waves”, is the standout. 

Twitter

Bandcamp

2. OGRE – Gradients Live

And once in a very long while, an artist comes along with a release that manages to be constantly unexpected in terms of craft and sound, all the while pushing the genre into territory as of yet unexplored. The entire EP was recorded live and in one take on forty-year-old cassette. And that odd quality to the sound? You’re hearing all hardware. Nothing on this EP was created in a computer. It’s odd and catchy and atmospheric all at once. A large part of the charm is found in the improvisational quality the music has, but it’s built on a foundation of true talent. If OGRE refines it, I can honestly see him releasing the Kid A of synthwave albums. Every song on this EP is the standout, but if I absolutely had to pick: “A3”. 

Twitter

Bandcamp

1.  The Northern Lights – Teenage Wasteland

The Northern Lights released an excellent album this summer under the moniker Astronaut Arcade. Teenage Wasteland was released shortly after, and it feels like the night following the summer day that permeated that album. The indie and nu-gaze influences can still be heard on this EP, where they are complemented by either catchy and breathy vocal performances or catchy and breathy synths. It’s chilled out, well written, and sonically interesting from beginning to end. “Say Goodbye” leads the pack as the closing track, bringing in everything that made the EP great with what I swear is some inspiration from Twin Peaks.

Twitter

Bandcamp

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2015/12/13/top-10-retrowave-eps-of-2015/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2014/11/18/wretrowave-com201411ogre-195-is-cinematic-and-striking-html/ https://newretrowave.com/2014/11/18/wretrowave-com201411ogre-195-is-cinematic-and-striking-html/#respond Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:00:00 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2014/11/18/wretrowave-com201411ogre-195-is-cinematic-and-striking-html/

While listening through OGRE’s most recent release, particularly
the funky “Job For A Cowboy”, my girlfriend walked by and said something
interesting: “Are you listening to 80’s soundtracks again?” This was
interesting because as I listened through 195,
one word kept popping into my mind. Cinematic. This album is completely
cinematic from start to finish. To be honest I have a lot to say about this
album. Both musically and stylistically it really brought a lot up in my mind.
I will try to keep this from going off on too many tangents.

The first two things that you will notice about this album
are the large amount of songs and the short duration of each song. This is
something interesting and I feel it represents a gradual shift that will
continue happening in music. We still define and structure music in terms that
were born in the vinyl era. I love listening to vinyl; it has warmth that is
hard to replicate digitally, but that paradigm doesn’t always work with age of
digital releases and Soundcloud. In the case of 195, this isn’t an issue. The short song lengths keep the overall
length comparable to other full-length releases, but it is vastly different
from other albums in so many ways. The songs are separated and aside from a few
tracks all have a distinct feel, though the transition between songs is often
seamless and makes everything feel continuous. For example, I felt like the
album really kicked off (and punched me in the face) on “Don’t Call Me a Hero”.
The thing is, that’s the third track. It never actually feels like the third
track, and listening to it on its own doesn’t feel as satisfying as listening
to it immediately after the two songs before it, and at a combined total of
1:43 it never feels like a chore to do so. The album would not work as well if
you played it on shuffle; I’d even go as far as saying it wouldn’t work as well
to not listen to the entire thing.

Musically, the album is similar in a lot of ways to Ed
Harrison’s 2009 OST release NeoTokyo,
an album I consider one of the finest overall pieces of music created over the
past 15 years.  195 fills me with the same kind of wide-eyed awe and sheer
excitement to be basking in a piece of music. These songs do not have a
traditional verse-chorus structure and take such dramatic turns that it is
really hard to not find your interest piqued throughout. Because of the
cohesive nature of the album, it becomes difficult to label songs as the best
on the release. There are several moments
that I would define as noteworthy and exceptionally interesting. The
aforementioned crashing of “Don’t Call Me a Hero,” the haunting middle of
“Sneaking Suspicions”, and the return of an other worldly melody that peaked in
an earlier song that comes full force in “Sentai” are a few that I can
immediately recall. As I have mentioned and will continue to mention, the
cinematic scope of the album is in high gear in these moments, the extent that
I feel as though “Sentai” contains a motif.

The short song lengths, while distinguishing the album from
OGRE’s contemporaries, sometimes feels like a hindrance. Several times I found
myself really intrigued by a melody or felt a strong reaction from a song and
just as I was really getting excited by it, the song would end. It sometimes
feels like the really exciting and memorable moments aren’t given their full
opportunity to be explored and elaborated and the tone can feel a bit rushed as
a result.

This album nails aesthetic style, which, while not being the
music, is an important aspect of any form of art for me. The artwork for 195 is beautiful with what I believe are
references to both Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The figure on
the motorcycle overlooking the city feels like a shout-out to the former, while
the ominous gargantuan figure very reminiscent an angel from Evangelion. I would have loved if Rebuild of Evangelion had used this or
similar music as a soundtrack. This movie-like / narrative quality to the music
is further complimented by the short exposition OGRE has on bandcamp about the
world of the album.

Any fan of NRW, fans of old anime, or anyone who can
appreciate cinematic and complex music need to check this out. It is fairly
priced and definitely worth it. It is introspective and brooding and moving all
at once.  I make certain to not throw the
word “epic” around. This is an epic album. Something metallic and monstrous
lurks underneath the surface of OGRE’s full length 195.

 – Joey Edsall (@JoeyEdsall)

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2014/11/18/wretrowave-com201411ogre-195-is-cinematic-and-striking-html/feed/ 0