We recently got a chance to sit down with one of our collaborators to get a little peek under the veil of their inspiration and muse for all things Chrono Trigger! Bryan Chan, otherwise known as bryface in the electronic music scene, is best known for his creative compositional style and use of OG hardware to deliver chippy landscapes that transport you to his own sanctuary of tones. Here’s a little of what bryface had to say in a retrospective look back at his cover for the main theme of Chrono Trigger DS:

 

“I wrote this cover of the Chrono Trigger theme a while back using a copy of KORG M01 Music Workstation for the Nintendo DS handheld. This means that this song was written entirely using a stylus -- in other words, by manually jotting the notes onto the DS touchscreen. 

One fun fact: Yasunori Mitsuda himself was involved in the KORG M01 software's development!

For this re-release, instead of the usual method of raw headphone jack recording, I tried a completely different process: separately re-recording each instrument/track through a cleaner-sounding 3DS unit - then de-noising, re-mixing and postprocessing those tracks externally in a DAW.”

“I had a lot of fun with this quite different take on the theme: equal parts 90's detective anime, equal parts late-night cable TV listings/shopping network. The extra bit of soloing in the second half was intended to reinforce this vibe :P. I also ended up running out of available song memory for this one, ha!

Extremely honoured to be asked to contribute to this compilation alongside a bunch of musicians whose work I'm a big fan of. I still can't get over how Chrono Trigger was such a dream-team project by artists and designers who at the time were all at the top of their game.” 

If you’d like to check out this song— along with other incredible tracks from Lena Raine, EQUIP, R23X, Smooth McGroove, Joel Corelitz, and Slime Girls— our limited edition release in collaboration with Materia Collective is still available in limited quantities over at Yetee Records.

Check out bryface’s website: http://bryface.waveformtown.com/

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