Needles & Grooves AotM /// Vol. 27 - September 2021 /// Jneiro Jarel - After a Thousand Years

For the next hint do we want it to be another completely random music video, another confounding image, or ~~~something completely different~~~?
 
My one big take so far is that it isn’t going to be a “name” artist. After the little bit of a panic in the General Thread and the reference to it not being giant in the first clue I don’t think it will be one of the larger artists that we’ve had a lot of guessed so far. They may be relatively well known within their genre/sub-genre but they ain’t going to have been bothering any charts or radios.
 
Joe Mac said:
My one big take so far is that it isn’t going to be a “name” artist. After the little bit of a panic in the General Thread and the reference to it not being giant in the first clue I don’t think it will be one of the larger artists that we’ve had a lot of guessed so far. They may be relatively well known within their genre/sub-genre but they ain’t going to have been bothering any charts or radios.
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I think you're right. I don't really think it's Beck but I wanted to guess something 😅 my guess was solely due to the fact that "Cellphone's Dead" from the album I guessed samples "Chameleon" from the Herbie Hancock album that was mentioned as a hint earlier in the thread. But even now looking back it seems "Watermelon Man" was probably more specifically the hint so I am just all sorts of wrong 😂
 
somewhat shot in the dark from how the act has played gasa gasa

i also have a hunch it relates to jazz in some way but this album isn't

Jessica_Hernandez_%26_The_Deltas_-_Secret_Evil_Album_Cover.jpg
 
Vinyl collecting isn't my only hobby. I grew up playing video games and while I still play modern consoles, I continue to have a nostalgic fondness for the 16-bit era of gaming, the Super NES in particular.

I've also been part of the emulation/rom hacking scene for over 20 years. I won't go into THAT MUCH detail about what that is, but basically there's been a long-standing group of folks who make fan-made changes to existing video games. It can be something as simple as replacing Mario in Super Mario Bros. with a poorly pixilated Trent Reznor and calling it Super NIN Bros. Or it can be translating an entire game into a different language, like translating the Japanese-only Mother 3 role playing game into English.

Speaking of Mother 3, let's talk about its Super NES prequel Mother 2, which you may know by its English name: EarthBound. It was a truly unique Japanese RPG when it was released in the mid-1990s. Instead of being set in a fantasy land where you fight dragons and save the world from supernatural forces of evil, EarthBound takes place in contemporary America where you fight skateboarding punks and hippies, and... ok you still end up saving the world from a supernatural force of evil.

The EarthBound/Mother series has a loving fanbase, which I count myself among. One thing I adored was its score, composed by Keiichi Suzuki, Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, and Hiroshi Kanazu, who gave the game an eclectic soundtrack that borrowed (and sampled!) many different genres. It's great and it has indeed been issued on vinyl thanks to Ship to Shore Phono Co!

The EarthBound soundtrack is not my Album of the Month, but I certainly recommend it if you find a copy at a decent price! No, let's go back to my rom hacking resume. While I love the original music, I always wondered how the game would be if it had an instrumental hip hop soundtrack.

So exactly two years ago this month I released a rom hack of EarthBound that replaces its soundtrack with (mostly) hip hop beats. These are real songs by real artists; I see it almost like a mixtape of sorts. Some of the music is classic, well-known stuff. Other songs are super random and obscure. Here's a video showing the first 20 minutes or so of the game to give you the gist of it:



Is this month's artist featured within this rom hack?????? Am I shilling my own vanity project????? Hell yeah I am.

Download the patch and music files here You're on your own finding the original EarthBound rom, though (hint: look for "no-intro" on Archive.org). This also only works on modern emulators like bsnes or recent versions of Snes9x so don't bother with Zsnes (which you really should have gotten rid of about 10-15 years ago anyways). It also plays great on a real SNES if you have the sd2snes/FX Pak flash cart. Feel free to ask questions here if you need help setting it all up.

The weekend is about to begin, so let's play some video games!
 
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