Mustin: This band only plays music from video games.
Mustin is a founding member of the band the OneUps, formed and still based in Northwest Arkansas.
Mustin: There are rare exceptions for the many nerd weddings that we've gone to play, where people will ask that we play, like, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." But for the most part, we get requests to learn a specific piece of music from a specific game that they want to do their first dance to or whatever. But if you come to a show, then you're going to hear 100% live video game music.
And the OneUps will be performing a show Sunday at the Momentary, with Bit Brigade also on the bill. We invited Mustin to come to the station to catch us up on the band's more than 25 years of playing here and around the world and to give us some insight about Sunday's show in Bentonville.
Since the OneUps have been playing together, there have been thousands of new video game releases. Mustin says the band's repertoire, though, is pretty much anchored in the classics.
Mustin: Like the original Castlevania, Mega Man 2, Super Mario World. Some older stuff, but we try to incorporate some of the newer things that are interesting. Like Undertale has a lot of fantastic music, which is only 10 years old, and a game called Celeste and Animal Crossing. So something will come across our desk, because we're also older now, having been a band for 25 years. Right? And we're not all just sitting there drinking beer and playing games like we used to. So we don't see anything new all the time now.
Kellams: All right, so I'm older than you, and my gaming kind of stopped at the arcade with Space Invaders, so I am woefully uninformed. I am not exaggerating, and I am not exaggerating. So take something. You mentioned Undertale. All right. So you have a piece of music that you really like in Undertale. Tell me what happens between when you hear it and when we hear the OneUps play it.
Mustin: It can be as simple as taking what's in the game and just assigning it to the instruments that we have. The Undertale main theme is a very sweet, picked nylon guitar. Do da da da da da dun dun dun dun. Like, so we just give that to William, our classical guitar player. And then there's a melody that's on the piano, and it has a little delay on it. Da da da da. I mean, it's just, it's pretty simple. Like, we don't have to do a whole lot.
We did an EP of Undertale music most recently, and it has a very faithful rendition of that. But then we did another version, which is kind of fun, that we did a very straightforward cover on the first track, and then the second track is the same thing, but we called it "Undertale the Two of Us," where we took that melody and then we put it under, like, the chord changes from "Just the Two of Us."
Kellams: It sounds creative, and it sounds fun.
Mustin: Yeah, it is fun. It's when we, in 2010, we did a "Super Mario Kart Album," which I will fight to the death is still the best Mario Kart game and has the best Mario Kart soundtrack. On that game is the tune that really started the band. It's called "Koopa Beach," and we did a pretty faithful rendition of it on our first album, which is kind of like a samba, Latin thing.
And then when it came time to make the "Super Mario Kart Album," we didn't want to just take the same track and pull it over. And so we had this idea of, we took "Something About Us" by Daft Punk, which is this really cool jam that's slow and thoughtful and has this really nice, like, modulated slap bass and these vocals. And we were able to use a modulation of that chord progression and put the actual melody from Super Mario Kart over the top of it, with very little change to the actual quality of the notes, and put that on a cool, like, Moog synthesizer kind of sound. And I'm slapping the bass and doing the whole groove. And people were like, what in the world is this? And we called it "Something About Koopa Beach."
Kellams: So what's happening here is you're honoring the music and the composers and letting, I don't know if you're letting people know, but you're throwing out there in the universe, this is legit stuff.
Mustin: Yeah. And they are there listening. They hear it. We've had the huge honor of having so many people, so many composers, endorse us. Gerard Marino, who wrote the music for the original 2005 God of War, is a big fan. He loves that we did his music. And then we got to perform with Lena Raine, who composed Celeste and some tunes for Minecraft, one of the biggest games ever. She came up on stage and played some of our arrangements of her music on stage, which is pretty cool.
And then we also performed with David Wise, the guy who wrote the music for Battletoads, for some of those old heads that'll be excited to hear about. But then also, everybody knows Donkey Kong Country and that water music that people love so much that's been sampled by rappers, including Childish Gambino. And he came up and played the saxophone, played the melody on our arrangement.
And then we also were handpicked to perform for Yoko Shimomura for her first-ever concert in North America. She came to Mexico City, and we were flown out there. And she is the composer of Kingdom Hearts and Super Mario RPG. But we were there because she, like, I don't know, almost 30 years ago now, composed the music for the original Street Fighter II video game, which I'm sure we're going to hear some of coming up in the Street Fighter movie on Oct. 16, which is very exciting. But the fact that, like, we got to arrange her music for her to sit there and play in front of all these people, it's pretty awesome.
Kellams: I just love that, like you said, the two ways someone will come up and say, I just love this music because, look, I've seen One Ups perform live before. I don't know any of that. I just know I like the music, but I couldn't tell you it's from Dig Dug. Does that work? Is that something Dig Dug?
Mustin: That's why. And if you like the bands, there's so many bands. When we started, there were five bands anyway. And yeah, one was in Sweden called Game Over, and they added lyrics and did Punch-Out and stuff. They were awesome. There's two rock bands called Minibosses and NESkimos, and there's a band in Florida that was called Select Start, and they were like a chamber with a cello, guitar, flute, violins. But we were this band, and we did stuff different. We were kind of like on the scene doing jazz and rock and funk and all these just different stuff.
So I got the idea around, like, 2003. I was like, get some video of this stuff. So this is 2003. All right. We're talking pre-YouTube, like maybe even pre-Myspace, I don't know. But I had to go and get all the consoles that I had, plug in things, get a special adapter to plug that into a thing that goes into my computer. And I'm very bad at video games, so I would play until I died. And then my buddy Duncan Skiles, filmmaker, who helped me put titles on it and then burn it to a DVD that I had on, like, a little baby's portable Polaroid DVD player. And then I would carry around a 32-inch freaking CRT and plop it onto the stage in front of us at Riley's. Formerly the Boom Boom Room.
Kellams: Yeah on Dickson Street.
Mustin: And then I would run the little DVD, and then we would change songs. I would push the button, which was sticky, and it was hard to get it to work sometimes, but I would push the button.
And then after one set at the Boom Boom Room, we were tearing it down, and this dude was like, he was way older. We were in our mid-20s, so he could have been, like, 40, and I would have thought he was old. And I'm just saying this old biker dude was like, "Hey man, that was a heck of a show. You guys are pretty good." And I was like, "Thanks, dude." He was like, "So on that TV, you got, like, video games. Are you playing, like, the music from that?" And it's like, "Yeah, everything that we're playing is from that game." And it's like, "Oh man, that's so cool." Because that just helps bridge the gap. If you don't know what's going on, here's a good clue. And if you do know what's going on, then nostalgia is surging through you.
Kellams: Tell me about the show that's coming up at the Momentary.
Mustin: We are doing a show with Bit Brigade, who is an incredible band. This is such an awesome pairing. We're going to go on, and we're going to do a bunch of cool retro stuff and some couple of newer things. Maybe some Animal Crossing. We'll see. But it's all just really great, ready-to-go funk and soul, and it's going to be high energy with some nice little dips, and it's just going to be a real good blast.
And then after us, it's going to be Bit Brigade, who's going to get up there. And their band is really cool because they started with doing this on Nintendo games. So a Nintendo is capable of creating four different sounds. There's what they call a noise channel, which is where you get that.
Kellams: OK.
Mustin: And then there is the triangle wave, which is the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So that's going to be the bass. And then you have these two square waves that create the melody and harmony, and they can be altered too. So that is drums, bass, guitar, guitar. So the five-person band has four people on instruments.
But then there's Noah, who is sitting in this little chair in front of a little screen, and they have a Nintendo system that is hacked to only put out the video, the visual and the sound effects. There's no music coming out of it. And while he is, like, he's just incredible, he speedruns the entire game, like, really fast, knows all the glitches, and he is playing it, and the band is playing the music live while he's doing it. So the stakes are so high.
I was there the first, I think it was the first time he ever died, was like 18 years ago or something. And the crowd went nuts. Like, we were all just so distraught. So you can imagine then, from when he restarted the level, that the excitement was so palpable. By the time he finished the game, everybody was just, it was a riot. It was amazing.
So they're going to play Castlevania and Mega Man 2. And I've never seen this before, and I'm interested to see how it's going to work, but someone from the audience is going to get to go up against Noah in Tetris. So they're going to do Tetris, which I've never seen them do, so that's cool.
Kellams: Where can people hear your music in advance of Sunday?
Mustin: Well, go to theoneups.com, and that'll link you to any of the stuff. We're all over all the streaming stuff. We have 10 albums up there. We've got several singles. If I were to say listen to one thing to get started, it would be the OneUps' "Time and Space." And there's a music video for it. And we added lyrics to this really cool tune from a game called Chrono Trigger that is very, very beloved for people that like role-playing games. And it's just extremely well done. It's extremely well produced, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.
Our first album had death metal, like Latin. It had classical guitar. It had funk. It had just straight-ahead bebop jazz. So it's very eclectic. There's something for everyone. But at this point, it's like overwhelming.
Kellams: Yeah.
Mustin: But that's the great thing about this, is that it doesn't have to be driven by what era this is. Like, if you want to get into, like, Frank Zappa, like, that's tough. I tried to get into Prince, and that was really hard, because it's like, where do you start? But this is great, because all we do is cover video game music. So what did you like to play as a kid? Mega Man? We got you.
Mustin is a founding member of the band the OneUps. They'll perform Sunday at the Momentary in Bentonville. Also playing Sunday, Bit Brigade. Pre-show activities, including games, begin at 2. Music scheduled to start at 7. All of the details at themomentary.org. Mustin was at the Carver Center for Public Radio last week.
Kellams: What about Frogger? Is that a thing worth doing?
Mustin: I don't know, man. I don't know if Frogger even has music.
Kellams: Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.
Mustin: Oh, that's right. Yeah. Jared the drummer, they came out with a remake of Frogger in the PlayStation one time, and he was always trying to get us to do something from it, because they made some kind of, like, groovy thing like that. That just was, like, a groove and had some sampled drums. I'm like, what are we going to do with this? There's no, I like, a really good melody is what gets me going.
Kellams: I know someone who wrote lyrics to the Frogger theme unofficially.
Mustin: Oh.
Kellams: If you ever want lyrics, I'll pass those along.
Mustin: This sounds like an excellent collab in the making.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
