Saturday, September 17, 2011

Songs to Grow On: Cutting Edge of Notion

Getting to watch a video game music composer perform his own pieces live is a unique and wonderful experience. Nobuo Uematsu performs for an audience periodically, as does Koji Kondo. This is a video of Motoi Sakuraba performing the battle theme from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. This performance shows how comfortable Sakuraba is when in front of a piano synthesizer (and how much he loves to include rock organ in his compositions). Enjoy!


 "Cutting Edge of Notion" - Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (written and performed by Motoi Sakuraba)

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Composer Spotlight: Motoi Sakuraba

With some of gaming's most famous RPG series under his belt, Motoi Sakuraba is one of the finest and most prolific video game composers in the field today. He's composed the music for the Tales series, the Star Ocean series, the Baten Kaitos games, the Golden Sun series, both Mario Tennis and Mario Golf, and a host of others. He transcends not only genre boundaries, mixing pastoral, orchestral sounds with a rock fusion sound, but also company boundaries, as he has worked for as many as ten different developers thus far. But what is it that makes his music so great?

Motoi Sakuraba