8-Bit Symphony - Black Lamp

Black Lamp
Timothy J. Follin, 1970-

From the Commodore 64 version of this multi-platform game from Software Creations. If your concert needs anything in the line of "orchestral folk psychedelia", you've come to the right place! Tim Follin, growing up a loft with a record player in his youth, ingested much of the 1970s in vinyl (more Jethro Tull, less Osmonds) and reprocessed it in varying quantities into a hugely impressive musical repertoire on the limited medium of home computer synth chip. A tune this complicated was difficult to port to other machines, and those got a Black Lamp lacking some of the frills, and a couple of the tunes. The astonishingly realistic harmonica in the C64 version is particularly hard to do without the kind of audio firepower of the C64's SID Chip. Composer Fred Gray of Denton Designs turned the title screen into "Elizabethan Serenade" for the 16-bit versions (see video at bottom of page). The Atari 8-bit version settled for rocking up the sedate Greensleeves from the other versions...

For this orchestral arrangement, the vision is of a deserted medieval castle that has just been raided by the enemy. The wind howls through the grounds, and a lone trumpeter plaintively attempts to rally troops that unfortunately didn't survive. There's also people nailed to walls for some reason. War is hell, I guess.

There have been numerous versions of this arrangement: there is one on Back in Time Symphonic Collection that's heavy on the Crotales before the musical whirlwind of Alisdair J. Pickering and Robin Tait rearranged it to be more playable and much less fussy. They also made section B straight-up Harry Potter-esque!

This published arrangement has not been recorded or played with a real orchestra as of time of writing (April 2025). Be the first! It's very short!

Composed by: Timothy J. Follin
Arranged by Chris Abbott and Alisdair J. Pickering
Orchestrated by: Alisdair J. Pickering and Robin Tait
© High Technology Publishing Ltd.