ReMix: Super Metroid 'Dirty Sam'

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Marc Star writes:

"Sorry I haven't submitted any songs in a while. I've been busy in the mix of developing my music career since I've graduated. I went to Japan for a month and have been building my portfolio, trying to find a decent job. As far as this song goes, it's a jazzy twist to a few of the Super Metroid tracks. It was done on a Yamaha motif 6, that I received as a graduation present."

I wish *I* could go to Japan and build *my* portfolio... but I guess I'll just jave to settle for also owning a Motif 6. Marc intros with some deep, filtered oscillating that sits hard enough right to give you that semi-clogged feeling in your ears when you get out of the pool after swimming a long time. Latin percussion is joined by a funky drum beat at 0'32" and a nice phat synth bassline, filling out the middle of the stereo field. The break at 1'05" kicks it MAJOR 70's style with electric piano and strings and adds a lot of depth to this otherwise more electronica mix, and it's thankfully repeated later on. Things then get a bit spacier with some thereminesque lead and digital arpeggios, and very stylized, bitcrushed percussion comes in on top the already well-layered drum track. Some cool, unorthodox string runs follow around the three minute mark, then things get back in to the original, introductory groove and pretty much stay there, with a variety of production tweaks, additive/subtractive measures, and breaks thrown in to flesh out the last couple minutes. At over six minutes, this is a longer track from Marcus, and it uses most of that time to simply establish a groove and let it evolve - in other words, it's not a mix that really "goes" places, builds, etc., but on the other hand, it's pretty infectious at times (the 70's riffs being my personal favorite) and takes Metroid in an interesting, ambient funk direction. The panel had some mixed feelings, with zircon and Gray both citing the hard-right panned pulse and a bit too much repetition for their taste as the deal-breakers. Depending on the sensitivity of your ears and whether you tend to hone in on a pulse of this nature or whether it can fade into the background for you, you may have similar issues on the hard panning and relatively high volume; conspicuous effects of this nature are tricky and are bound to rub some the wrong way. Didn't bug me once the primary underlying beat got going, but the very beginning did give me the afforementioned underwater "wooziness" - your results may vary. Binnie had similar qualms but still reached an affirmitive conclusion, specifically noting repetition after the four-minute mark:

"Four minutes through, I was still impressed by the arrangement. The repetition until that point was negligible, and everything was a go. Past that, the gated synth and recycled beat manage to keep the mix on life support for two MORE minutes."

Whereas The Wingless offered up rather unqualified, eloquent praise:

"This mix is quite delectable, a joyous child sired from the electronica future and the 70's funkadelics. Truly, we have a entered a golden age of the trans-genre mix!"

It'd seem that your sensitivity to the pulse - which is more of an issue at high volumes on respectable headphones - and your patience with groove-oriented, longer mixes would thus be two key factors in whether this mix does something for ya. I'm somewhere between Binnie and John, myself - some of the repetition bugs me just the slightest, and the very intro, on headphones, has some issues, but overall Marc brings the funk and gives Samus a dirty reputation in all the right ways.

― djpretzel