Any% EP - Sunnexo ♪

Any% EP

Team up, go fast
a collab with Tanger

Bandcamp release includes a bossa nova bonus track!

Thanks to Tanger for collaborating!
youtube - twitter


And also big thanks to ROSSMAN for the art!
twitter

Any% EP - Dev Talk

It’s 2023 already, time flies. Tanger messaged me back in May, asking whether I wanted to do an actual collab that isn’t an April fools joke!

We didn’t really know what kind of music to make so we just went through a ton of ideas. One did stick though and I remember posting a clip on twitter in July. I tried combining chiptune with color bass and it was pretty well received!

Any% was supposed to be a standalone song but we ended up with more songs than we planned. We decided to challenge ourselves a little and used the same vocal sample as a base for our 2 individual songs. It’s pretty interesting to see how we both use the same sound in different ways. It led to some pretty different but still coherent tracks and I think they came out pretty well!

We weren’t certain what theme would fit the songs because they were so different in style and tone. We were considering topics involving explosions, hacking, chemistry, bot dogs... and at last we figured speedrunning is the one topic that covers all of them. For context: the category “Any%” is the act of completing a game in the shortest time possible by any means necessary. Runners use their knowledge and years of practice to do that. Runs can also be Tool Assisted, which means they’re allowed to use software to program a set of instructions for the game, instead of playing it by hand. They’re really spectacular to watch!


Sound design

Let’s talk about the sound design!! But first a backstory.
Last September I went to a concert called “Eindbaas”, it’s an event centered around chiptune music. One of the headliners was Defense Mechanism, he makes music exclusively using a Gameboy which I find extremely impressive! We hung out in Amsterdam a couple days before the show and it was a lot of fun. The concert was amazing, and besides Defense Mech I also got to meet a bunch of people I’ve been admiring like meganeko, EX-LYD and RoccoW for example, and even new people such as pouale, 4ntler and infotoxin!

They really made me appreciate chiptune even more than I already did. I ended up buying a Gameboy myself so I could make chiptune like they do, it’s been a blast so far. It’s just so much fun to combine modern electronic music with retro chippy sounds! With the help of apticx I managed to find the right parts to upgrade my Gameboy with. It now features a brand new shell, clean audio and a backlit screen!

So yeah needless to say that I put more chiptune in these songs than usual. I highly recommend anyone interested in making chip music to try out Little Sound DJ too (LSDJ for short),  it’s completely free!

Besides the chip stuff I’ve also been doing a lot of resampling with my sound design. I play around with any synth or sample, record that, and chop it up in a cool way to create nice and glitchy textures. The 2nd drop in Aimbot uses this technique and the 1st half of any% does that too. This “Rolling Sampler” plugin by Bird’s made it a lot less tedious to do! Support indie devs <3


Artwork

The music’s finished, we figured out the theme, now all we had to do was work on the cover art!
Initially we were planning to try mixing pixel art with normal digital art; Tanger being regular and me being pixelated like our other song covers. Unfortunately Avolicis was occupied with another huge project so I’ll have to keep that idea for some other time!
Tanger introduced me to Rossman, a really talented artist. I haven’t commissioned an artist in a while because Avolicis is too kind and draws everything for me!!! Naturally I was kinda nervous at first but Ross turned out to be really chill and patient, even after I nitpicked every single detail in her sketches... thank u ross very cool =w=

I think the art turned out amazing!!

Thank you for reading, you can listen to any% below

Bandcamp release includes a bonus track!

Thanks to Tanger for collaborating!
youtube - twitter


And also big thanks to ROSSMAN for the art!
twitter