Fans of retro games will no doubt recognise the name: the Japanese video game composer and programmer Keiji Yamagishi is famous four his work on Ninja Gaiden and many other great (S)NES soundtracks during from tenure at Tecmo. Yamagishi-san moved on to produce his own chiptune music together with Brave Wave Productions when the gaming industry moved on from composing music in only eight bits.
His 2015 solo debut duo album, Retro-Active Pt. 1 and Retro-Active Pt. 2 has been on the daily playlist ever since I bought it. I’m a sucker for 8-bit chiptunes neatfully mixed together with contemporary beats, which is exactly what you’ll be paying for here. The first track on the first part, aptfully called First Contact, is enough to give you a taste of what you’ll be in for:
It doe…
Fans of retro games will no doubt recognise the name: the Japanese video game composer and programmer Keiji Yamagishi is famous four his work on Ninja Gaiden and many other great (S)NES soundtracks during from tenure at Tecmo. Yamagishi-san moved on to produce his own chiptune music together with Brave Wave Productions when the gaming industry moved on from composing music in only eight bits.
His 2015 solo debut duo album, Retro-Active Pt. 1 and Retro-Active Pt. 2 has been on the daily playlist ever since I bought it. I’m a sucker for 8-bit chiptunes neatfully mixed together with contemporary beats, which is exactly what you’ll be paying for here. The first track on the first part, aptfully called First Contact, is enough to give you a taste of what you’ll be in for:
It doesn’t stop there: Yamagishi-san collaborated with multiple other big hitters from the (retro) video game music world, such as Manami Matsumae (Mega Man, Trip World, Derby Stallion, …) and Ryuichi Nitta, his trusty co-composer who also worked on Ninja Gaiden.
It’s best to let the music do the talking here. If the first track from Pt. 1 hasn’t convinced you, perhaps the first track from Pt. 2, Thought Police, will:
I also love the album cover art. If you simply can’t get enough, there’s a remixed version Brave Wave also put out that I have yet to discover. As always, both albums are available at Bandcamp. It looks like Keiji Yamagishi released a third related album in 2019 called The Retro-Active Experience which is a compilation of the first two and a few remixes. That’ll be my reward for writing this and searching for the accompanied links. A quote from a random review left behind on Bandcamp:
“Yamagishi is a living legend.” – CHIPTUNES WIN, Glenntai
Indeed.
Happy Saturday!