Nxa - The Dragon Slayer (album)

Hello, everyone!
I've been absent from the forum for along time, but now I'm back for the reason I first created an actual profile here.
Since I haven't been active, I could have contented with just a visitor profile. However, I made a proper one for a particular reason... Briefly, I'm a Finnish 22-year-old man, who adores Berserk and have made quite a lot of music with my FL Studio. In December 2009 I had just completed and "released" myself a concept album entirely based on and inspired by Berserk. Well, I might just copy/paste my introduction from BandCamp:

Concept album, inspired completely by the "Berserk" manga and anime series. Great, great stuff. Incidentally created the Dark Fantasy Music genre when crafting this album. This is an instrumental album.

"The Dragon Slayer" was originally released in late 2009, and now it's finally available in digital form. Included "album art" is not the original art, it's just a picture I found in the depths of my HDD.
The physical edition includes a handmade sleeve, and you may order a physical CD by contacting me via nxa@live.fi. At some point it may be available to purchase directly from this page.

released 06 December 2009

That year I had first seen the anime, by accident, really. I fell in love. In time, I purchased all the manga volumes and have enjoyed them plenty since. During that year, the album just became obvious project that I really worked on. Even with it's plenty faults (artist's critical eye...) I cherish it as a certain peak of my musical creativity. Only few single tracks here and there reach such focus and passion.

Anyhow, having a handful of physical CD's made, I soon realized, that I really didn't have an audience. And by natural course this site came about, and I found a highly potential audience. As far as the theme of the album goes, at least, and the songs on it are a tad bit ...funky for the general taste.

But I faced a dilemma. I had a dozen of copies of a CD, development of which cost me more per disc than I charged for one. A reward for the art and music it self was humbly set aside, in hopes of finding even one or two customers. Well, I forced couple of friends to buy it. But now I was going to put quite anonymous music out for sale on an international Berserk-forum? Postal costs? Waaay too much for me to handle. And I have to confess, I had sampled one song from the original Berserk soundtrack, so the legal pressure was there too.
blah blah blah... years pass... blah blah blah

Long story a bit shorter, I finally had The Dragon Slayer in it's entirety on the Internet, digitally. Awesome. The controversial sampled song is now there for free, so no problem with that.
...Yet still no buyers. Time to man up and try my chances here By the way, it's 2 AM right now and I'm super-tired, so
HERE IT IS:


http://nxagospel.bandcamp.com/album/the-dragon-slayer



You are all very welcome to listen to it as much as you like, and if you like it, feel free to support me (and my studies ) by buying a copy for yourself. The two "singles" are there for free, Ode to Guts and White Hawk.

So that's that, finally. Time to sleep. I would be more than glad to conversate about TDS, my other music, anything at all. I consider myself back and active.

Listening now. Great first track. I'm REALLY digging "Ode to Guts," which makes great use of the sample from the Hirasawa song.

Welcome to the forum and keep up the great work.

Gobolatula said:

Listening now. Great first track. I'm REALLY digging "Ode to Guts," which makes great use of the sample from the Hirasawa song.

Welcome to the forum and keep up the great work.

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I'm with Gobs on this one. 1st track and Ode to Guts are the ones standing out. Welcome to SK.NET.

Thanks for the positive feed-back!
Man, you have no idea how I'd like to go on and drivel about my music and analyze every single notion of the album
But for now I'll just give this thread some time to exist and the music to sink in, and let some possible questions arise. I've been excessively listening to it myself for a change, and also got absorbed into this forum. I'm tangled with Berserk all over again :3

Nomad said:

I'm with Gobs on this one. 1st track and Ode to Guts are the ones standing out. Welcome to SK.NET.

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Ditto. Nice work man. When you said you were Finnish, I thought "man, Berserk songs would sound pretty cool with that signature Finnish Deathmetal sound" and was expecting something like that hah!

IncantatioN said:

Ditto. Nice work man. When you said you were Finnish, I thought "man, Berserk songs would sound pretty cool with that signature Finnish Deathmetal sound" and was expecting something like that hah!

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Hopefully I didn't disappoint you with my unconventional tunes, then.
Obviously there is a lot of hip-hop present and infused to the overall sound. That I might regret to a certain extent, but only for some mixed artistic/commercial reasons. That is, after all, pretty much my "signature sound" anyway.

If I had a chance to go back in time and rework the album, I guess I wouldn't change it. However, if I were to make a follow-up, I'd expect more grand variety of musical style to take place, or expansion at least, in respect of this one. Believe me, I have considered of making a second Berserk-album for a long time. Stuff I've done since this project has improved in my sight and some others', but nothing's consistent enough for an actual release. I have nothing but scratched the surface of Miura's world with TDS, everything-wise.

The new one would go more in depth in every way. TDS just takes on very confined and concrete themes and forms straight-forward tracks out of them. I took the main characters, the mercenary-lifestyle, monsters, terror and horror, scars of the past... That's pretty much it. There's nothing wrong with that to me, the album is exactly the way I want it to be. But it excites me to think, how much more there is to explore and how it can be told in the form of music. Admittedly, I'm not a master musician nor a producer, but I feel that I have developed enough in these years, that my contemporary expression of a previously visited subject could be of some interest to an individual other than me.