You may or may not know this, but I am a huge Turrican II fan, so it thrills me to see that the game’s composer, Chris Huelsbeck, has launched a follow-up crowdfunding campaign to his Turrican Soundtrack Anthology from a few years ago that focuses specifically on turning the music of Turrican II into a new orchestral album.
Turrican II: The Orchestral Album celebrates the 25th anniversary of the game’s launch on the Commodore Amiga in 1991 by proposing the creation of an entire new music album comprised of orchestral arrangements of some the most iconic music from the game, recorded by the FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague and produced by Thomas Böcker, Roger Wanamo and Jonne Valtonen at Merregnon Studios, along with Huelsbeck himself.
Turrican II – The Orchestral Album will feature nearly an hour of completely new, never before heard, orchestral arrangements of some of the most popular pieces of music from Turrican II. Tracks planned for the album include The Final Fight, Freedom, The Great Bath, Concerto for Lasers and Enemies and The Desert Rocks. We will be revealing more tracks as the project progresses. Depending on the campaign’s success, all backers will get to hear Turrican II’s orchestral beauty from December this year. – Kickstarter
On top of the new music, there’s also a bunch of new artwork created specifically for the album, which will be features as high-quality prints available in a handful of the tiers in the campaign. This is on top of the album itself, which is available in digital format at the $15 tier, physical CD at the $30 tier and in a 2-record vinyl release for the $65 tier. (Along with everything from lower tiers.)
The campaign is currently about halfway through meeting it’s basic funding goal of $75,000 with half of a month still to go, so fans (like me) of the Turrican Soundtrack Anthology and Huelsbeck’s other albums such as Symphonic Shades should keep their eyes on this.