A new Australian album was recorded and mastered directly from Nintendo’s Wii video game console.
Remote Control, the debut album from Brisbane-based Beat Therapy, features 16 chill-out tracks and is available now from the iTunes music store as well as via Amazon and eMusic.
The tracks were originally recorded as the soundtrack to the bubble-popping Wii video game called Pop.
Composer Andrew Curnock says the songs were assembled using a sound palette of less than 10 Megabytes. “The production style is sometimes stark and exposed when compared to tracks on your typical chill-out compilation,” he says. “This gives the tracks a feeling of naive innocence on occasion, like a nightclub scene drawn with crayons.”
Curnock, who first started writing music for games in 2006, says the album’s title has “a few layers of meaning”.
“There's the obvious reference to the Wii-remote, but it also has a lot to do with the work cycle on the original project in 2006. I was wrestling with all the intricacies of writing in a new format for a new platform, and getting the code to behave properly, though (games developer) Nic Watt (and the Nintendo development hardware) was in Sydney.
“To add to the complexity of the task, I couldn't actually properly hear anything I'd written until Nic recorded the output in Sydney, and emailed me an mp3. It was a very slow and painful process... It took days just to get drums at the right levels, then set panning assignments etc. I was working by remote control.”