Konami Dream: Berserk!
SIDE A
1. Intro / HashiDiaku / LookIntoMyEyes / TheKiller / Mother / Guts
Hacker/rap collective Konami Dream's first mixtape, based on the brutal and moving Japanese manga/anime series Kenpū Denki Berserk. The group reportedly became fascinated with the manga after downloading handmade "scanlations" from a UseNet posting board. Upon the release of the Berserk anime series in early 1997, the group's new producer, an ambitious and somewhat heavy-handed pop whiz from suburban Long Island named Kevorkian, obtained an illegal Berserk VHS dub and set to work sampling, or "chopping", loops from the Berserk OST and other related material by its composer, Susumu Hirasawa.
Berserk! was created in the wake of resident hacker fantom_limb AKA S.O.T.A.'s arrest, under the nebulously defined Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The mixtape followed the group's initial series of "phreaque leaks", expanding the group's meditative sound into a more complex forms, while nodding to the hype-laden, insult-ridden rap mixtape tradition.[1] Ever the tech-miscriants, they distributed the mixtape via a process known as "Hotlining" - cryptically uploading the audio and artwork to the recently launched Hotline Connect, a streamlined successor to the Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, community (essentially, the internet's version of Skid Row). Nestled amongst Hotline's bastion of darknet drug sales, pornography, and illegally traded .mp3 files, Konami's Berserk! spread like wildfire. The mixtape's final track, a poignant ode to the series'protagonist Guts, found legs beyond cyberspace's underbelly, receiving local airplay and, reportedly, causing tension within the group. Kevorkian and the rapper LKA Hades, hoping to secure label funding, departed, setting to work on the macabre, John Carpenter-inspired Hellraiser, an LP of dense lyrics, bombastic production and - to its own detriment - endless waves of expensive and unclearable samples.
- ↑ Aspects reportedly pushed by the commercially-minded Kevorkian, despite the group's reported refusal to track simultaneously or "hype" each other's rhymes.