It was really hard to choose the top three, but here they are (in no particular order):
Type-A - Amigos Mutantes
Oh f*#k yeah! Those bitcrushed, glitched out vocal chops are absolutely brilliant! And the stringy synthpad at around the minute mark just blew me away! I get a beautiful, calm and bittersweet - maybe even bit of a postapocalyptic feeling. Like those beautiful moments you can experience when you´re in a city at night alone. Everybody is sleeping and there is an eerie serenity everywhere on the empty streets. The production is really good, the track is well mixed and everything feels well balanced and full! Freaking A+ to you sir! Great stuff!
sunnk - augury swore the skull of essence
God damn this is amazing! The sounddesing on this is top notch! Mind bending stuff… When the low frequencies join in my brain just melts away. Overall it feels very organic, yet somehow sterile (in a very good way). It´s like I´m witnessing some sort of alien interaction and I have absolutely no idea what is going on. Yet what I´m seeing is immensely aesthetic in all of it´s alien weirdness. Amazing stuff, truly amazing, much kudos to you!
Make A Wish - Pixel Friends
A lovely chiptune composition. Cute, quirky and positive. The optimistic feeling in this just hit me in the good spot! Made me smile and bop my head. Well composed, beautifully simple and straight forward - very fitting for the genre. This is definetly something I could dance to crazily with my friends on a saturday night-in wearing weird costumes and being all silly and cute. Very enjoyable tune, I like it! Good job!
And here are some minireviews for all the rest who submitted a track:
aemonarmada - GT94mk3MB12
I enjoyed the blend of natural sounding percussion and distorted sounds. Harmonies/choice of scales makes this feel somewhat “middle eastern”. The guitar also brings in a psychedelic vibe (as in that 60´s psychedelic rock way). Ver cinematic, could certainly be used in a moviescene or in a game. Good job!
T3AC VFX - Dperc2 Full10m
Ah, acid! Nice 303 type sequences. Over all I get the feeling like I´m listening to a live jam. To me the mix feels a bit muffled and bassheavy, could probably be fixed with some mixing. Loved the 303 stuff though!
Panos Kostagiannis - Friends By PanosK
Overall a nice tune. The timbres of different instruments seemed first a bit fragmented, but it all came together to make a coherent piece of music in the end. I liked the chiptuneish lead sound very much! I felt it could have used something like just an electric bass or something in the low frequencies to play together with the guitar - but that´s just my personal preferences. Good job!
EatMe - Fulltime Lover
Very driving rhythm and the over all feeling seems to flirt with some jazzy stuff. Love the rhythms of those piano/synth chord stabs. And the trumpet was really cool! For me personally the constant forward drive of the drums became a bit repetitive with not too many fills/breaks in there - but again that´s a personal preference. Good tune and coherent sound overeall!
HeartBeatHero - Lets be friends
Sucked me right in with that bass sound in the beginning! I really liked this one! Good sound choices and everything sits comfortably together in the mix and in the composition. So many freaking cool retro synth sounds! And nice drums! Overall a chill, relaxed and stimulating track! Good job! This is definitely one of my runner up tunes!
Clouds Gone - Fritzens Friends
Ok, this is weird…but very cool! This german fellow keeps on telling me things in a language I really don´t understand through the whole track. But I do feel he´s friendly, maybe my he´s my new mutant friend. Exciting timbral choices and very bright and uplifting feeling overall. Enjoyed it, good job!
Rægæ System - Mutating Frends v02
LoFi jungle - certainly hit the nail on the head with that goal. Nice and coherent tune with some oldschoolish bass stuff. Some sounds felt very compressed data-wise - as in bitcrushed or lowquality mp3 converted etc - as they should in a genre that has “lofi” in the name. Good job!
trusti - take control (my mutant friend)
A decent techno tune. I liked the kick and the synths play really well with it. Very much dance music to my ears. Made me bop my head so well done!
The Comfortably Awkward - soci_anx(overstim 1.3)
Man this is really good! A fascinating track. Very personal and unique composition. The listening experience was very visual - as in story like, made many pictures pop in my head. The mix feels a bit veiled and muddy at times, but it didn´t really bother me much with this one. Sound desing and timbral choices are intruguing and suprising. Absolutely loved the the strings and the choir and the retroish lofi feel they had! That bit took the track as a whole to another level for me! This is like a David Lynch movie in an audio form. Really enjoyed it, well done! Also, I think the artist name fits this perfectly, this is precisely comfortably akward!
Stailer - Best Friend Ever
Good track! Guitars and drums sound very good, and the bouncy synth is spot on! Enjoyed the guitar solo as well. The part after the guitar solo with a bit more rough sounds just glued it all strucure-wise together for me. A very good composition with a bittersweet, kind of postrock-melancholic feeling to it. Really liked it, well done!
Exutoire - Emwan
This made me feel like multiple very different separate worlds very presented to me simultaniously in some sort of a glitched out parallel existence. The harps and pianos took me to a fantasy world of knights and magic and mystical creatures, yet the drums made me feel like I´m in a dark, lonely and modern industrial world. In the end the synth chords took me to a new place again. The ending made me feel like all these worlds somehow collapsed and disappeared all togheter as a one intertwined system. The “this-cabel-is-broken”/“this-data-is-corrupted”-type glitchy noises made this just perfect! A very interesting experience, listened to it many times! Good job!
Garfferen - Mingling Mutants
Good production, everything sounds balanced. When the drums came in I instaltly thought “that is a very nice sounding kick drum”. The intro with the foleyish ambience was cool! The synths sound very analog. Nice track, well done!
Uilo ( W lo W ) - Mu
I don´t know if something got messed up but the soundquality on this one is garbage (sounds like there could be a high-resonance lowpass filter set pretty low on the master? Or a flanger of somesort? IDK… There is another pretty similar track on the artists soundcloud called 2019 Mutant break 12. That one was ok, had some interesting sounds.
ghismart - RST
A nice dnb tune. Nice gritty bass sound in the beginning. I feel drum´n´bass is all about heavy bass desing, so I think this could have used some additional subs and a bit more modulated sounddesing. I felt the mix was a bit thin for the genre. Maybe it´s because it´s in C, not the easiest key to make your subs to have weight. Of course this is all just personal preference and my associations with dnb, so take it with salt!
Other than that, some of lead melodies felt very anthem-like at certain moments, which I think was pretty cool.
Charly Blackbone / Vivace / BotB - The Flame Of Thunder
Now that´s intense! Hell yeah! Gritty basses, fast drums, 180bpm. I don´t know what to say. The breaks were good, the bass is good, the leads were fitting - the whole thing is very good. The change from the intro to the fast breakbeat stuff is supergood, caught me offguard! Well done, good job!
Seal Meat - We Might Be Under The Effects Of Ionizing Radiation But Let’s Play Video Games>
Crazy stuff - I love it! The sax/horn/whatever it is, is just crazy. The bass riff is amazing, the guitar riff is amazing, the drums are INTENSE. Wild, creative, intense. I like it very much!
Lilith 93 - Artificial Intelligence
Got some serious terminator vibes from this one. Those long paddy synths playing the melody, the text-to-speech stuff and the somewhat omnious overall feeling I guess. I enjoyed the small little glitchy sounds coming and going every once in a while. The synth at around 3 min is a really cool sound. Well done!
e4r - Bohm’s Trajectory
Nice contrast between the heavy guitars and the chiptuney synths. Maybe a bit demoish sound quality overall, could certainly use some mixing. The length of the track felt a bit too long for me, became a bit repetitive when compositianlly there was nothing new happening. Overall a nice nintendocoreish track with pretty authentic sounding chiptune timbres.
elias - Mutant Candy
Positive and bright, yet somehow twisted in a subtle way. The marimba was definitely a nice touch! Quirky composition. I got a bit of a weird twisted carnival ambience in an unreleased N64 or PS1 game feeling. Was an enjoyable and mentally stimulating experience, well done!
P L O M - CZ 200 V9 (MUTANT BREAKS #12)
Glitchy, choppy, stuttery. Seemingly unrelated pieces of audio come and go in a very jerky way. Seems like I´m listening to somebody turning a tune knob on an alienradio that has some sort of antistatic circuit to cancel the static between the channels. Every once in a while a more or less coherent beat establishes itself, just to be switched away the next moment. Towards the end the listener settles on a weird station playing fast glitchy music, but figures very soon that listening to a radio isn´t what one is wants to do right now.
trotch - Woody Harrelson Remix
I don´t know what to say about his one. A decent, fast dnb-ish tune. Dark and omnious harmonically. Dark synth leads with timbres that could be used in some anthems. My favourite part was the towards the end with the sampled speech and pads playing organ like stuff. Good tune!
this beat - Somehow Someway
Now that´s quite a way to start a track! The distorted bass and the streched sample work beautiful. And that bass sound is just fantastic in its own right! The sort of half-time feel in the beginning was super cool and made the overall structure feel thought out. Good drum programming and I really enjoyed the pads around 3 min. Well done!
Acodreon - Mutants Brews Shit In The Swamps
Holy cow! Yeah, they mutants certainly be brewing sum shit in the swamps! Gorgeous stuff! Enoyjed the liquid sounds very much. I think the speech worked well with the music: “and to get it going faster”…hell yeah! Enjoyed this one very much good job!
Frank S - Heavy Weight Sound (Mutant Breaks #12 Tasty Edit)
Yeah, that definitely is some heavy weight bass sounds! Well put together dnb track. The mix sounds spot on. I particularly enjoyed the switch into the silly mode towards the end - very nice touch! Overall an amazing tune!
Redman - Render Up Little Man
Wow, I mean, wow. This is insane! The drum programming is INTENSE and I absolutely love the synths that come in and pair with the crazy drums. Very stimulating! Definitely gonna steals some ideas from this one! Brilliant stuff, you´re a freaking jedi!
The Bellows - Mutant Breaks 12
The bass starting the track is AMAZING, thats some serious bassdesing right there! It is quite a long tune with several ideas, and couple of times I felt it became a bit repetitive before moving to the next idea. At 6 min when the synth came in, it felt a bit like a totally different track just started. So structurally this just didn´t work for me. Other than that an overall decent, well put together track. Nice work!
FX Send - Freeman’s Drum Machine
If Gordon does have some sort of an extradimensional alien drum machine, it probably sounds something just like this! Nice squelchy 303 stuff in the background, really enjoyed that. Enjoyable drums sounds too. Overall this felt like a live jam with some knob-twisting being in the central focus here. Extremely good work! Really enjoyed this!
AAmadeus - Mutating Friends Shittune
Nice little chiptune. Many blips and blops I enjoyed. Composition is actually pretty brilliant: even though its just more or less the same theme modulated a half step up two times, it does really fill the whole track without feeling overly repetitive. And those modululaions are crafted with some very nice chords! I can definitely imagine this in a indie game modulating up in halfsteps endlessly with some smart gradual octave changes. Nice one!
Maya Azem - Foreign Affairs
I really like this one! Very nice synth sounds! The feeling this conveys is just amazing! So bright, so hopeful, so light. Happy and optimistic. I really dig the march-like snare too! I don´t know what else to say! An absolutely amazing tune, great job!
lusd - MBV12 - Mutating Friends
Some jungle type stuff with some pretty prominent speech synthesis sounds in there. The mix feels very narrow, almost like mono for most parts. And its kind of muffled too. There is a low rumble present throughout almost the whole track and it seems to mask everything else. The theme for MB12 was definitely present there, so good job with that.
BlueFountain - RN2019SUMB12
This one feels very fragmented. It´s like theres separate ideas that seem to be connected only through being put in the same project. I mean you could definitely make this as an idea work, but this time for me it just didn´t. There was couple of nice filter sweeps somewhere in there though - and I did like a couple of the tempo change thingys.
mios - Joy Div Soc
Nice sound choices, very chiptuney! Has a somewhat dnb drive to it. The chord choices are also very cool! And that synth solo melody thingy does a couple of pretty damn cool things in there too! This could definitely be an ending credit tune to an anime series - great job!
