ReMix: Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos 'Ashtar's Desires'

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S|r NutS, whose previous three submissions were of Sonic tunes (albeit from three different Sonic titles on three different consoles), ventures into Nintendoland for some coverage of Ryu Hayabusa's second NES adventure. The ReMixer writes:

"So yeah as Usual from me, I made a Trance Remix of this tune. Only that this time is not too much of a synth mesh. It has some touches of house and ethnic, with some parts that concentrate on the use of melodies using pianos, flutes, and some other stuff. My electronica stuff is here anyways, as it wouldn't be me without it. I decided that the original was a bit simple and tried to add more counter melodies to give it more depth and rhythmn, as well as new stuff to complement it, I think that at the end the result was a mix that flows very well between the genres."

Mike always delivers solid, hard-hitting trance, and this is no exception; here he uses the first half of the mix to establish a traditional, competent trance structure, with layered percussion that adds some bongos and syncopation to the action, but mainly relies on the same staccato hook. He starts changing things up more in the second half, though, with a break at 2'38" that gives the flute some time to shine while not overpowered by synths, and then enters with a dirtier, rising, filter-crazy riff. S|r NutS is one of those guys you'd never wanna get anywhere in the vicininty of a Sherman Filterbank, as there's every indication he'd be stuck twiddling knobs in fits of epileptic glee and bursting the eardrums of all around him mercilessly. In a good way. Volume here is a bit high, but it's not subtle music, and when there's a bit more nuance going on which requires decibel normalcy to catch, the ReMixer dials it back a notch as needed. Larry took issue, however, and had some specific recommendations:

"My suggestions would be to eliminate the piercing frequencies (flute), achieve a bit cleaner seperation of sounds so you can hear the supporting elements better, beef up your synths a bit (the keyboard in particular), and make a more coherent freestyle section from 2:38-3:04."

I'm not sure about beefing up the synths, myself, as it sounds like they're already what's for dinner, but the other comments/ideas are where I'd have headed myself in providing feedback. It's pretty clear from past submissions though that Michael has a sound that he likes and that he's pretty intent on sticking with. When he does enough within his own margins to make a track sustainable, usually via paying more attention to the arrangement, the results are still very enjoyable, even if the production sometimes lacks EQ polish and has a few irregularities to it. That being said, analoq and Binnie didn't think things were noticeably uneven, so user experience may certainly vary. I personally like the variety that's achieved in the second half of the mix, but would like to see more thought towards pushing some of those musical ideas up the stack so that they appear earlier on - better to grab interest and proove you're not on auto-pilot right off the bat than to raise the bar later on when the hasty may have already reached incorrect conclusions. At any rate, I can't see fans of trance and/or Ninja Gaiden tunage not digging this, and it's another winner from S|r NutS.

― djpretzel