ReMix: Super Street Fighter II Turbo 'New Mexican Thunderbird'

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Shael Riley, Malcos, and a posse of potent performers are proud to bring you Blood on the Asphalt: A Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo ReMix Collaboration, jam-packed with arrangements of every character's stage music and several additional tracks as well. You can find out more at the website, http://sf2.ocremix.org/, designed by Richter, or just get on with it and download the torrent post-haste, as I think you'll be feeling it. Even if you have no tactile sense whatsoever. Shael writes:

"Blood on the Asphalt is a tribute album to the music of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, its contents comprised of new arrangements of old, familiar songs from the original game soundtrack, created by various artists, unified along the lines of genre and tone. The arrangements contained herein have been designed to be evocative of dark, pseudo-romanticized urban imagery: abandoned playgrounds and crowded street markets; back-alley block parties and hole-in-the-wall bar dives, scenes that are, I hope, befitting of a tribute to one of the most iconic games in arcade history."

It's worth noting that this is essentially a Street Fighter 2 project, a Super Street Fighter 2 project, AND a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo project, and probably other incarnations as well, since the score was essentially shared by each iteration, so Shael's "iconic" label is primarily targeted at the original SF2. It's also worth noting that this debut track from Vurez is probably the least dark and urbanized piece on the playlist, but it's also a kickin' jam and goes where no OC ReMixer has gone before in covering T. Hawk's stage music. Ahh, T. Hawk... you have to at least applaud Capcom for trying. They certainly had national and ethnic diversity as an action item when they left their pre-planning meetings and prepared their TPS reports. Whether those of Native American descent felt at all represented by this large man with tight jeans who insisted on jumping far higher than he should have been able to and swooping down like a bird, we'll never know. I personally felt some peyote-oriented attacks, maybe something where he bludgeoned his opponents with a peace pipe, wouldn't have crossed the line of acceptable political correctness, but no dice. Regardless, he did have some catchy musics to accompany his Southwestern antics, and Vurez has taken said song and turned it into an A-grade spaghetti western soundtrack that Morricone himself would be proud of. You've got low tremolo electric guitar, hand claps, various brass (with various articulations), violin, requisite acoustic guitar solo, the 'whistle' sound from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and even some chanting and singing. Not sure if that last bit is sampled, recorded, or a mix, but it integrates very contextually. This arrangement is a match made in heaven for Vurez, who is particularly adept at believably putting together large ensembles of instruments that are all appropriate to a given genre and both sequencing and mixing them with cohesion. It doesn't hurt that he has a seemingly endless smorgasbord of stellar samples in his arsenal, but samples are not guarantors of success, especially for an arrangement like this, that so relies on articulations, timing, and a knack for knowing what goes where. It pays dual homage to T.Hawk's composers and to Ennio Morricone and other spaghetti western composers that put together scores of cheesy but very musical theme music for Clint and others. Vurez continues to impress with his versatility, and I think you'll find that the overall project follows suit and is brimming over with creativity that pays musical respect to one of the most important games of all time.

― djpretzel