Evangelion and Chiptune
By The Eva Monkey on Friday, August 27th, 2010
A number of months back, I was exposed to the Chiptune genre of music by way of Weezer: The 8-Bit Album, a collaborative, fan-produced tribute album featuring an array of Weezer tracks in the style of chiptune. I thought it was pretty awesome, and I listened to it quite a bit over the span of some months. Meanwhile, I started watching Penny Arcade’s video series, which featured a lot of chiptune music as its soundtrack. Gradually I started to explore the chiptune music scene, checking out the various artists, and generally enjoying it a lot. And then I go back to Penny Arcade recently to see that they’ve added a whole documentary about chiptune music called Reformat the Planet. This gets really weird for me when I notice one of the featured artists, Bit Shifter, sporting an Evangelion T-Shirt in the first part of the documentary. It’s kind of weird, but awesome, and I dork out a bit to that connection to my fandom that I wasn’t even expecting. But that little nerdgasm is nothing to what I discovered next. We were discussing our favorite versions of Cruel Angel’s Thesis over at Eva Geeks, and I commented that I would dork out to a chiptune version, which several posts later dug up something very much along those lines. Last year, some Japanese Evangelion fans put together a collaborative fan album entitled We Are (Not) Alone, which mixes together a diverse range of styles of music, including none other than chiptune. Some of these tracks are pretty awesome, and it is definitely worth downloading and giving a whirl, if for no other reason than to hear the glorious nerdgasm finale that is an over-the-top chiptune rendition of Komm Susser Tod. Definitely check that one out, you will not be disappointed.
Update:
I also found a cool cover of Cruel Angel’s Thesis over at 8bitcollective:
https://8bc.org/music/PANDAstar/Battle+of+the+Angels+%28Neon+Genesis+Evangelion+cover%29/
Update 2:
Some mirrors for content that is no longer available: