Announcing: Project Light, A Concept Chiptunes Album Featuring the Hottest Famicom-era Composers

Just a few days after releasing IN FLUX, Brave Wave Productions announced a new album at Bit Summit MMXIV called PROJECT LIGHT that features some of Japan's most well known and beloved game composers, including Manami Matsumae (of Mega Man, Mighty No. 9) and Yoko Shimomura (of StreetFighter II, Kingdom Hearts). PROJECT LIGHT was born from the vision of (Creative Director) Mohammed Taher wanting to resurrect the Famicom-era composers and remind the world that they're still here with us and they can make good music. It's a story-driven album that tells the story of a planet on the verge of destruction due to an imminent supernova (an explosion of the sun); and thus we follow Light, one of the highly-advanced humanoids built to investigate the problem and reverse the doomed sun's fate.

 In addition to Manami Matsumae and Yoko Shimomura, the album features Harumi Fujita (Mega Man 3), Junko Tamiya (Strider), Takashi Tateishi (Mega Man 2), Yasuaki "BUN BUN" Fujita (Mega Man 3), Mari Yamaguchi (Mega Man 5), and Ippo Yamada (Mega Man 9). The album is directed and supervised by Mohammed Taher of Brave Wave, with Ippo Yamada serving as the Music Director and hally as the Music Producer. The three are aiming to bring a new side of chiptunes to fans of videogames and music. The album will be released "whenever it's ready," as Taher said on stage, with the expectation of finishing the album at the end of the year.

Brave Wave Productions recently held three live shows at Bit Summit MMXIV, featuring live performances by Manami Matsumae (Mega Man), Chipzel (Super Hexagon), and Saori Kobayashi (Panzer Dragoon Saga). In addition to that, the label recently released IN FLUX on both iTunes and Bandcamp, featuring music from Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill), Keiji Yamagishi (Captain Taubasa), Jim Guthrie (Sworcery), Eirik Suhrke (Spelunky), as well as music from the Bit Summit live performers. The company is working on a number of unannounced music projects to be released later this year and the next, in the hope of delighting game-music fans everywhere in the world and especially those who favor Japan's videogame musicians.

IN FLUX: East-Meets-West Collaboration Album Available Now

Bandcamp | iTunes

IN FLUX is an East-meets-West music album that merges the two oceans together in an unprecedented way, featuring the musicians of Evanescence, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Silent Hill, Panzer Dragoon, Sworcery, Spelunky, and more. The union of Japanese artists alongside their Western friends shine through the album, sidestepping the language gap and communicating entirely through the universal understanding of music.

IN FLUX is an album that celebrates the joyous and ever-changing nature of music, not constrained by genres or languages or styles—but celebrating the history and the culture that music is able to cultivate and nurture. The album's visual style was achieved through Zurich-based Fabian Oefner's stunning lenses that captured the fragile luminosity of soap bubbles — an imagery that goes in hand with the album's philosophy and approach.

A limited run of the album was available at Bit Summit MMXIV in Kyoto, selling more than a hundred signed copies by Mohammed Taher (director), Manami Matsumae (advisor), Keiji Yamagishi (composer) alongside their Western friends Eirik Suhrke (composer), Stemage (composer) and Chipzel (composer). You can buy the album on Bandcamp, digitally and physically, or you can use iTunes alternatively. We also designed a very-limited t-shirt, drawn beautifully by Simon Alander and worn on stage by Saori Kobayashi (of Panzer Dragoon) and Yumiko Takahashi (of Suikoden).

Brave Wave is officially incorporated!

JANUARY 14, 2014—Official company name to be “Brave Wave Productions Limited”

Brave Wave Productions is a music label based in Tokyo, Japan, dedicated to exploring the interplay between videogames, music and nostalgia. The dual-natured label produces and publishes music albums, both solo and compilations, as well as compose music for videogames. Working together with music composers from the videogame industry, Brave Wave creates music that uses games as a basis of its concept, and the label’s ultimate goal is to work with musicians and artists from all over the world to create top-class music albums for both gamers and fans of music alike to enjoy.

Originally, Brave Wave began as an individual internet project by Kuwait-based Mohammed Taher under the name “Koopa Soundworks.” Taher felt that Japanese composers who had quit composing music should return to their roots and start composing once again. Since the end of 2012, Brave Wave has released two albums, "World 1-2" and "World 1-2: Encore" before being founded as an actual company, with music from composers like Keiji Yamagishi, Akira Yamaoka, Austin Wintory and more. The label will continue to make music following its official establishment. In addition, the first game title Brave Wave was partially involved in, “Shovel Knight” by Yacht Club Games, is scheduled to release in the first quarter of 2014 in North America and Europe.

Tokyo-based Alexander Aniel will handle all management duties as Chief Executive Officer and Business Development Coordinator, as well as day-to-day company operations, while Mohammed Taher will act as the President and Creative Director of the label’s current and future projects. Together, they work with global videogame composers like Manami Matsumae and Eirik Suhrke to create multicultural music albums. The visual identity of Brave Wave is designed by Cory Schmitz, signifying the bold and unconventional job the label carries upon itself.

In March 2014, Brave Wave will participate in “Bit Summit MMXIV,” showing off albums that are currently in development, and is delighted to announce that three artists will be performing at the event live. The label plans to release its third full-length music album "In Flux" in March 4th, 2014 with limited copies available at the event. The album's central theme is the collaborations between the composers of the East and West, featuring original music from Manami Matsumae, Tim McCord (of Grammy award-winning Evanescence), Keiji Yamagishi, Akira Yamaoka, Saori Kobayashi, Chipzel, Stemage, Eirik Suhrke, and more.

“Giving the world good music” and “Bringing together the videogame industries of Japan, the West and the Middle East” are the slogans in which Brave Wave is being established upon.

January 14, 2014 Brave Wave Productions Limited

Mohammed Taher — President, Creative Director Email: mohammed (at) bravewave.net

Alexander Aniel — CEO, Business Development Coordinator Email: alexander.aniel (at) bravewave.net

Welcome home: Marco, Manami, Keiji

Hello everyone, Mohammed here.

When I started working on World 1-2 in August of last year, I was directing and planning things alone. In fact, there weren’t any ‘music label’ plans — just one music album in mind. It felt great to work with so many talented folks and I'm very proud of the end result. I'm currently busy with the followup to World 1-2, titled Encore, and a great percentage of it is still an extension of the work I did back in 2012 (hence the title).

Past the World 1-2 Saga, I won't be doing things alone anymore. I'm happy to announce a new team that I'm going to work with throughout all of our future Brave Wave releases: Marco Guardia, Manami Matsumae, and Keiji Yamagishi. All of them appeared in Brave Wave's first album: Manami and Keiji each composed a new original track, while Marco mixed Manami's track and has served as the technical backbone of the whole operation since his arrival mid-February.

Marco Guardia is a professional composer and mixing engineer from Switzerland with over 15 years of experience under his belt, and he's going to technically supervise every release we put out. His composition skills will appear in future Brave Wave albums as well, starting with Encore, under the alias Monomirror. One key thing into hiring Marco? He takes his work to heart. You want to work with people who believe in what they do enough to not only take it seriously, but personally.

Both Manami Matsumae and Keiji Yamagishi will serve as co-planners. This means I'm going to both plan (pre-production) and direct future albums with them. In addition to providing compositions for BW, they will be directly involved with me in operating the label and producing music albums. Keiji and Manami both worked in the gaming industry — back when composing for games wasn’t the sanest thing to do. You know Keiji from his work on the original Ninja Gaiden, as well as Tecmo Bowl and the Japan-only Captain Tsubasa games. Manami is known for composing the original Mega Man, as well as contributions to both Mega Man 2 and 10. Mega Man games aside, she composed U.N. Squadron and is currently working with us to compose a couple of new tracks for the indie retro sensation Shovel Knight.

Also, sometime in the near future, Brave Wave will publish solo albums. All four of us will serve as "judges" in evaluating and accepting pitches, as well as looking for new artists to sign. We're already working on Keiji Yamagishi's first solo album; it’s shaping up great, and I have a feeling it’ll wow you in more ways than one. Let’s give you one example: ‘Memories of T’ is being reworked to have guitars — by none other than Metroid Metal’s founder and guitarist Stemage -- with a new mix by Marco to encompass this new sound. It’s smoking hot, guys.

In the meantime, have a listen to this new teaser for "World 1-2: Encore", our upcoming album. Unlike World 1-2, it’s all remixes — from Mega Man to Zelda to Sonic and plenty more. We even brought back the talented Video Game Orchestra to work on a Super Hexagon remix. Can you believe it? A fully-orchestrated version — with a rock band, nonetheless — of Chipzel’s addictive chiptunes.

New team, new plans, new albums. I can't wait to share more of what we've been working on for the past months. We’re challenging the status quo with all our might and are anxious to see how everything unfolds.

Game on, Mohammed P.S. This wouldn’t have been possible without YOU, the person who cares enough to read our blog posts and buy our music. Your love and support makes a big difference to us. Big hug to all you beautiful souls out there who keep nudging us to make more music. You won’t be let down.

Manami Matsumae is working on Shovel Knight!

Exciting news! You probably heard about it on the team's Kickstarter page already. But if not, go there and check it out. Manami Matsumae, composer of Mega Man, is a signed Brave Wave composer and is working on several projects with us. So, we hooked her up with a game! Shovel Knight is her first non-Japanese game to work on. Although Brrave Wave is a music label that focuses on producing music albums, we are also trying to bridge the apparent gap between Japanese composers and non-Japanese teams — especially independent ones, those with no language skills or a clear path to work with them.

Shovel Knight will be composed by Jake 'virt' Kaufman, while Manami is contributing two tracks to the game. Shovel Knight, as the team said before, is going to have authentic 8-bit chiptunes. But that's not all: they're going to extend the 8-bit sound to using the VRC6 abilities; that's 3 extra sound channels in addition to what you usually hear on a NES game. "The [VRC6] chip contained support for 3 extra sound channels (two square waves and one sawtooth wave). It was used in Akumajou Densetsu (the Japanese version of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse), while the western version used the MMC5 from Nintendo."

The team has yet to decide which tracks should Manami compose, but here's a hypothetical rundown of the process:

• The team will design an area. Enemies, level design, colors, stage gimmicks, and everything in between.
• The team provides us, Koopa Soundworks, with all the necessary documents to give to Manami. This includes screens, notes, composition notes (“we want it mellow”; “we want it fast-paced”), and so on.
• We put everything in a nice, printed document (translated to Japanese) and give it by hand to Manami. Crazy, huh? We will sit down with her and even give extended direct instructions.
• Manami does her magic, and everyone lives happily ever after.

So, that's really exciting! We got Manami to finally work with a Western developer, and hopefully this opens up a lot of doors to everyone: us, developers, and composers. There's no secret mission here: We simply want to resurrect our favorite living legends — be it on music albums or video games.

Things you could (and should!) do:

1. Spread the word! Share this post with your friends and pets.
2. Back Shovel Knight on Kickstarter. It's a lovely game.
3. Follow us on Twitter. We never spam.

Now, let's get shovelin'!