ReMix: Wild Arms 2 'Lord Blazer, The Robot who Chills with da Peeps'

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Kunal's original title for this was "Lord Blazer, the Robot who time travels back to current day to chill with da peeps" - we couldn't quite fit the entirety and didn't want to set the dangerous precedent of encouraging potential run-on sentences as mix titles, but still... let it be known. Wild Arms is one of those series I never really played, which spawned an anime I never really watched. Apparently ktriton's not played it either, but that doesn't stop his arrangement of the Battle vs. Lord Blazer theme from being creative and... rather different. Think "heavily-reverbed spacey jazz fusion" with percolating cross-delayed saxophone bits and a bass that is utterly recalcitrant to consistently anchoring the progression or sticking to quarter notes. There's a bit of an issue with clarity on the bassline, as when you apply this much reverb to a fretless bass, which is already very round, and then pan it right, as done here, it's gonna tend to act less like a bass and more like a wave of tone. I can see applying the extensive verb to the other elements, but I think leaving the drums and bass a little cleaner would have brought the arrangement forward and potentially given it more momentum as well. It's a short piece, though, almost like an impressionistic sketch, and seems less concerned with relaying a narrative than with setting a mood. Gray really dug the bass:

"...The chords are hot, and the bass writing is arguably some of the best I've ever heard in this community. This music reminds me of a lot of keyboard players of the late 80s/early 90s. This reminds me a lot of the Korg M1 and T series demos."

It does have the feel of a demo from that era, I'd tend to agree. I'd be one of the "arguers" as to this representing some of the best bass writing on OCR - I think it's some of the most unorthodox, and certainly the bass plays a more pivotal role, but sometimes it felt to me as if it were trying too hard to specifically avoid treading anywhere near convention - even if it would have helped the overall piece. Still, you have to love fretless - relatively underused in these parts. You might want to listen to this one a couple times right off the bat - it's short, after all, and the structure might reveal itself the second go-round. Quoth Larry:

"Overall, I liked the strangeness of the rhythms/beats here. Though the arrangement was there, everything performance-wise seemed badly off-kilter here to begin with, but you acclimate to it and "figure it out" better over several listens."

Let the acclimation commence. A peculiar, meditative piece from ktriton, which doesn't last long and doesn't really take you from point A to point B, but is nevertheless transporting.

― djpretzel