A little while ago I was looking for tunes by one of my favorite artists, Eat_Rabbit and I found a compilation album I had never heard before. The list of musicians read like a who’s who of European Chipmusic so it was an obvious download. I am no expert, nor do I pretend to be “hip”, “groovy” or “cool” but I do seem to be lucky enough to stumble across quality releases that people don’t mention to regularly. Seems like a reasonable concept for a column?
Ukrainian netlabel DWD Records released Level Up in November 2007 and from the first track its awesome. Cornbeast, who you might recognize from his recent 8BP EP opens with a nice stompy Gameboy tune. Electrox from Stu of Dropdabomb fame is perhaps a little darker to my mind than some of his other tracks? “Dig You Own Tomb” is weird and wonderful even by Eat_Rabbit standards. If I had a gun to my head I guess the genre would by “Egyptune”? perhaps “Gameboy Cairock”? who knows? I am sure most of you have heard of Goto80? Good stuff, “Honolulu” is an ace little C64 track in the middle of the album. Uoki-Toki contributes a Game-boy track called Gorilka Dance. If you like it, check out his Myspace, there are 6 or 7 EPs for download. I don’t feel brave enough to guess what Datassette or Paza used for the final two tracks but I like them both and the round out the release well.
Level up has been in pretty high rotation for me over the past couple of weeks, some of you may have heard it before but if you missed it first time around, its well worth your time. If you like it, drop by DWD Records and send them a nice mail, maybe we could convince them to put out some more releases…
01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock” 01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock”
02 Stu – “Electrox”
03 Eat_Rabbit – “Dig your own tomb” 03-eat-rabbit-dig-your-own-tomb
04 Goto80 – “Honolulu”
05 Uoki-Toki – “Gorilka Dance”
06 Paza – “Damnfool”
07 Datassette – “Where The Hell Am I?”
DWD Records
Complete Release – 34mb.zip
Comments
6 responses to “Various Artists – Level Up”
DWD Records rocks.
From Russia with love!
Forthcoming 8GB release with those comrades :)
CombiNATION is also quite good!
Ethan
This is good news, I am waiting for Retinascan to ship me Pravda (admittedly most of this delay way due to me giving them the wrong shipping address but I need my truth damnit!)
lazerbeat: I am wondering myself if they are shipping.
I haven’t seen a single scrobble of the album on last.fm since its release :/
Thats highly suspect, I screwed up the address on my 1st order so it basically wont arrive, the second order I placed was on the 18th of march and it hasnt arrived, nor have I had a shipping notice. Burkhard from RS got back to my enquiry lightening fast so I would drop them a line and see whats up.
As well as the release 8GB mentioned, I know of at least THREE other artist releases by absolutely legendary European chipmusic artists coming out on DWD…such a wicked label.