New Featured Artist: James Landino

James Landino of rhythm gaming fame joins the lineup as osu!'s latest Featured Artist with 6 brand new tracks, made especially for use in osu!. And as an added bonus, three fully storyboarded beatmap creations from the Mappers' Guild are available for play right now!

A veteran music producer and touring DJ, James Landino just also happens to be a massive rhythm gaming nerd like the rest of us, and has spent much of his career introducing the nuances of video game music to EDM to widespread acclaim.

To kick things off, some of the original Mappers' Guild team have been hard at work creating three full beatmap sets for you to experience, complete with some wonderful hand-made atmospheric storyboards courtesy of the mind of Noffy.

Check them out:

Reaction feat. Slyleaf by pishifat featuring Milan-

Birdsong by Mao

Hide And Seek by Mirash featuring RLC

But don't take this to mean that all the new tracks have already been mapped - there's still three more left for the intrepid to conquer, with quests for a full pack likely soon to come for those esteemed members of the Mappers' Guild. Interested in joining? Check out the link and find out how to join - there's a ton of benefits, and anyone can become a member if they meet the requirements!

Here's a sneak musical peek of all six:

Birdsong

Hide And Seek

Hit That feat. Hentai Dude & Tofuku (osu! Edit)

Reaction feat. Slyleaf

Shiba Island

Spellbound

As always, the above tracks are available over at James Landino's Featured Artist listing, and are 100% free for use in mapping. Go forth and map his wonderful work, guilt and risk free.

In other news, we've recently brought so many new artists on board the Featured Artist project that we've had to sit down and reconsider our two-a-month release schedule that we've been maintaining strong all year so far! Depending on how things go, June might be a very busy month indeed!

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more details on upcoming releases — and rest assured that genre diversity is well and truly on the menu for the rest of the year. We've put the pedal to the metal rather hard, so to speak! Among other things.

We'll let you figure out what those might be!

—Ephemeral