ReMix: Perfect Cherry Blossom 'Icy Peaks'

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Newcomer Justus Johnston has obscurity cajones the size of small moons (that's no moon... it's a space station!!)... with this ReMix of Perfect Cherry Blossom, a Doujinshi shmup for PC that's also been translated to English, he pretty much earns them in one fell swoop. This title barely meets our own criteria for a submittable game; not just any old demo can be ReMixed, it has to be a game with a significant audience, sold for profit, etc. Justus sent us a veritable tome of information along with his submission, which made it considerably easier to track down what it was we were listening to a ReMix of:

"Perfect Cherry Blossom is the 7th game in the "Touhou" series, AKA Project Shrine Maiden. This series is, for the most part a series of vertical shmups set in Gensokyo, a sort of "far-East wonderland" inhabited by various magical creatures out of Japanese mythology. They are a very particular brand of shmups known as "danmaku", or "curtain fire", where instead of dodging relatively few quick bullets and enemies, you must weave through a tapestry consisting of an insane number of relatively slow bullets."

But wait, if you thought obscure game choice was the only unique thing about this track, you'd be dead wrong. Of the mix itself, he adds:

"I actually threw the notes together last night while taking a break from some paperwork. I impulsively decided to record it after work today (I work at a recording studio, so it wasn't that hard a decision) The arrangement calls for 4 violins. In this case, I just overdubbed myself 4 times, so all 4 are me. They were recorded with a Shure SM-81 mic'd from 2 feet above, off-axis, in our main isolation booth. Everything was recorded and edited in Pro Tools via a DIGI001 (using old-school AMR preamps)... As for the music of the arrangement itself, I'm quite pleased with it. It's been a long time since I've tried anything "classical", so it's kind of nice to discover that I can still do it after all these years. The harmonization is reminiscent of the neo-classical style, a la Prokofiev (or Koichi Sugiyama even, for that matter). Even though many of the actual chords used are the same as in the original, this arrangement manages to feel extremely different from the original.

So, you've got what sounds like a chamber piece of sorts, except the verb is heavy enough that it'd have to be more like a cathedral than a chamber. Perhaps Donald Trump's chamber? At just under two minutes, this is a brief piece, but it's wonderfully mature and conspicuous, sounding like the type of contemporary classical that gets employed in classier Hollywood and foreign period films. As a warning to the treble-sensitive among you, this goes into the upper registers of violin-dom, and with four of those suckers firing at the same time, you get some real altitude. This is the type of arrangement that essentially dictates the instrument(s) involved be played by professional musicians; I shudder to think what four amateur violinists would do to it, or for that matter how much would be lost if even the best of the best sample libraries were employed. In a word, it's beautiful, though... I know I overuse the adjective 'cinematic', but in talking about game scores it has few synonyms that convey similar meaning. This piece is cinematic, especially the section starting at 1'04" - striking, sublime, epic, and moving could all equally apply. This is fantastic, singular work and it's a damn shame many may pass it by due to the unfamiliar source material - I don't care if you have no intentions of ever playing the game or anything remotely like it, you owe it to your ears to check this piece out. Judges had concerns about the amount of substantive arrangement, but while the melody is pretty darn close, the supporting string parts are where JJ has clocked some time on expanding the original. While the piece is brief, it achieves a mood that is absolutely cohesive and emotive. The recording and performance are superb, and as a side note it was interesting to get so much context from the ReMixer, who clearly cared about the game and the series enough to take some time and explain what's up. Shariq said:

"This is nirvana. String work is gorgeous."

Amazing violin work indeed; the layering in particular is very well done - it never feels explicitly like one performer quadrupled over himself. I'd love to see Mr. Johnston lend his violin skills to some collabs - I can see major potential there - but as it stands this solo/ensemble approach is rather unique, and turned out well. Timely posting, too; DC's cherry blossom festival just concluded!

― djpretzel