Overview

Doujin events have become a sort of various remix albums as well as original music. Following the trend of other game composers, such as Supersweep and Nanosounds’ Nanosweep series, members of the Namco sound team decided to start releasing some of their own original music, made in Fruity Loop Studios. The first volume features AJURIKA, the brainchild of the newly formed Pinokiti Records, Hiroshi Okubo, Ryo Watanabe, and syatten. How does it turn out?

Body

The album opens up with AJURIKA’s “White Strawberry.” Like most of his electronic based works, it gravitates towards a psytrance sound. While the accompaniment isn’t anything special, at least compared to his works on Samurai Damacy, I do think that accompaniment is what makes this track quite enjoyable. Lots of synthesizer tones and some piano work give it an ethereal touch, compared with the more energetic backdrop. Overall, it’s a solid, but slightly generic, tune.

Ryo Watanabe’s “RISE” is similar to his most of his Nanosweep tunes. While those have certainly fallen in quality over the recent releases, I think that “RISE” manages to conjure up images of his earlier, much stronger Nanosweep contributions. The combination of the modern electronic tones and the jazzy piano chords and disco strings really helps create a nice dynamic atmosphere. While he has utilized this technique more recently, I feel that this tune really nails the contrast of modern vs. old.

“Sweet-Sour,” by Hiroshi Okubo, is a drum n’ bass inspired tune that I think would fit well into a Ridge Racer game. It has a very mellow tone overall with some beautiful vocal samples and parts of it remind me of his work for Ridge Racer 3D. However, I do feel that it sounds more like Okubo on auto-pilot. It’s not a bad tune by any means, but it isn’t Okubo’s best work either.

Lastly, syatten closes the album with “Unbraid.” This theme definitely would work well in a club with its electro influence and catchy melodic hooks. It’s one of the longer themes on the game and while it doesn’t vary much throughout its course, the random keyshifts and bubbly piano melody line really make it quite listenable. It also feels as though it would work well as a racing tune for a night-time track.

Summary

In the end, I think that Fruited Vagabond is a solid listen from start to finish. While some of the tunes sound as if they were on auto-pilot for some composers, each track is a distinct style and helps diversify the album quite nicely. Fans of any of these artists will probably enjoy their contributions and the album can be previewed via Soundcloud, although the album price is a bit steep, this could be due to the fact that it comes with a printed booklet and a jewel case, unlike the Nanosweep titles that sell for a fraction of the cost due to their CD only nature.