About rewriting what has been written before

These collections of music could be called a virtual collaboration between one German and many (mainly) Japanese desktop musicians. But the workflow was uni-directional: I remixed the output of my talented colleagues which they considered as finished compositions (in various styles which they call themselves "Techno", "House", "Drum & Bass" or "New Age"). Because my Japanese collaborators made the fatal "mistake" to publish their work as Standard MIDI Files (SMF), it could easily be analyzed, deconstructed and remixed.

Sure it was big pleasure for me to re-write what has been written before! I felt a bit like Igor Stravinsky de-composing the music of 18th century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (which resulted in his famous ballet "Pulcinella"). My attitude towards the originals shifted from irony to admiration and back.

By the way: as far as I know, none of the featured composers earns a living with his work, all of them could be called "hobbyists". I never met anyone of them in person, I choosed the tunes by musical criteria only, browsing the Internet for "Original MIDI Compositions for Roland's SC-88 Pro Sound Module".

I hope the listener will have the same pleasure in listening to this New Millennium Instrumental Pop Music as I had in working it out!

Why two collections?

Japanese Modular contains tunes that are more on the Easy Listening side, East Asian Desktop Music shows the more excentric, exploratory and dark side of East Asian creative spirit.

The Tunes

Here is some specific background information concerning the re-mixes. More general information about the original composers and similar artists can be found here.

• The drum 'n' bassy Alone is originally composed by Takeo (NO Homepage available). - The remix of Darkness features a harsh collision between an electric grand piano (I love this sound), 3 concert flutes and a heavily distorted metal guitar. The virtuoso e-grand section is part of the original.
• Bring back my Heart and Wind Layer were originally composed by club music constructivist J-Esperal (NO Homepage available). B.b.m.H. is a confrontation between a Gamelan-like ensemble (incl.the Chinese instruments Suona [oboe] and Gu Zheng [zither], the Japanese Atarigane [bells] and Balinese Bonang [small gongs] and Anklung [rattle]) and a European bar piano trio. - The original Wind Layer comes somehow otherworldy and I re-worked the composition to even strengthen this impression. The rhythmic coherence of the tracks is rather loose, which gives this tune a mysterious, floating feeling.
• Erde and Sunset Glow are originally composed by weird guy Nayuta (Homepage) , who seems to be a germanophile. On his former homepage, guests were welcomed with "Heil Melody!" (?!). In his music, he's mixing Japanese Folklore with New Age and Trip Hop elements.
• Jah-shu-kah, Rock 'n' Roll Silver Car and Radio are originally composed by Mr. Jun "June" Miyagi (Homepage). In real life, he is a drummer and his drum sequencing is indeed enormous. I'm especially getting high on that loop on Rock 'n' Roll Silver Car. GREAT!
• The Groovy Night is a re-composition based on material of someone who likes to be called Death13 (Homepage). I added a flute solo and brass lines here. The original music sounds like a Japanese re-incarnation of Afro-American Soul Music of the 1970s.
• Hyper Ambience is a rather straight Tekkno track by Tack (Homepage). I spiced it up a bit by adding some irregularities. - Fluctuation is a quite relaxing, easy-going mid-tempo tune by the same author. Here, the melody is played by the Zampona, a Hungarian Pan Flute, rich in overtones.
• Device of time Leap was originally written by Fuyuno (NO Homepage available). I procduced the e-guitar solo work on a MIDI keyboard. - Shut-in is a small, but beautiful Samba-like tune. I tried to imitate a soprano sax here.
• Sight is originally composed by Calmsea. I like his music because of its simplicity. Everything you hear is just where it should be, there's nothing to be left out. The remix has a lot of structural enrichments compared to the original version.
• I discovered Phalaenopsis (="Orchid") in 2001 on a strange website by someone who called himself Fizko (NO Homepage available). The site was entirely made out of ASCII-text and looked like it was designed by an extraterrestrial life form. I was immediately fascinated by the dense texture of the tune and the richness of musical imagination it contained, so I decided to re-mix it, despite it is Kitsch, in a way. The Fizko site vanished some day, so I have no chance to find out who composed the original.
• Love & Peanuts and Plan 99 by the admirable SC88Pro wizard Mr. Masaru Iwai (Homepage) are relatively short, dense tunes in their original form. To be honest, I had the impression that Masaru didn't evaluate the depths of his own musical ideas in the original versions completety. So I tried to "improve" the compositions by radically re-composing them, trying to get out what I think is their essence. Love & Peanuts is a very moving, dramatic piece of music with a feeling of tragic in the background, whereas Plan 99 is extremely funky (that baseline!) and funny (ever heard a recorder and a french horn as lead instruments in a jazzrock tune?). I played the piano solo in the middle part myself.
• Bayside Crisis by someone who calls himself Silhouetti (Homepage) is the only non-Japanese piece of music in the whole collection. Silhouetti alias Mr. Jin-bae Park is from Korea. For me, his creative approach sounds like a *weird* amalgam of Easy Listening Music and Asian Folklore. The Philip-Glass-like ending was my idea, but the underlying arpeggios were totally taken out of Mr. Park's original. In my opinion, the main theme of Bayside Crisis is of great freshness and - yes: innocence.