ReMix: Highway Hunter 'Fast Cars, Russian Cigars'

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For those not in the know, PRC or "The People's Remix Competition" is one of many competitions held regularly involving remixing of some kind. You can browse them on our Competitions Forum and see what's been going on lately; PRC in particular is very well run and has been both persistent and consistent for a goodly time now, often yielding results that end up being submitted to OCR proper and, in cases like this one, passed. Bladiator, whom we last heard from back in March with an excellent FF8 collab with Tepid, brings us this ReMix of... Highway Hunter. If you've never heard of much less played HH, you're not alone... one of the great things PRC does is attract attention to ReMixing more obscure games, which has specifically been lacking lately. Karl writes:

"I hadn't done a remix in a really long time, not to mention a PRC, so I decided to give it everything I had. This is reminiscent of Moontang although it's more screeching violin rather than slow melodic. The intro was supposed to sorta lead the listener off-track by giving it a rather French street corner amour, and then jump right into the frantic melody and the accordion player in the background who wants his chance in the limelight but usually is overshadowed by the violinists so he makes up for it by playing wild chromatic runs."

Nothing like inter-musician dynamics involving overshadowing violinists and compensating accordion players to liven up your day. Really groovy harmony work here, and awesome breaks toward the end like 2'28" which play with your expectations. Speaking of such, I saw Joey DeFrancesco at Blues Alley on Thursday night, and they did a fair bit of that sort of thing. At one point during a short rest in a piece they were jammin' out to, where you would have expected a slide or riff, Joey turned on this little techno preset pattern on the Korg X50 he had sitting on top of his B3... friggin' hilarious. Definitely recommend catching these guys; they played an amazing set, and I thanked Joey at the bar afterwards for incorporating EP, flute, strings, and analog synth parts using his Korg - a lot of times synths are seen as toys by "true" jazz musicians, but if you see Joey D play, you'll know better. Right, back to the mix... as Karl himself acknowledges, the instrumentation here is similar to his other FF8 mix, so if for whatever reason you weren't diggin' that, this might not be your cup of tea. Blad's got the Au Bon Pain European street band thing going on big time, and kudos to him for having the cajones to so visibly spotlight accordion in his arrangements. This piece is playful and fun while at the same time musical and well-constructed. Most of the judges felt like sample quality could have been worked on; while the material used does fit the arrangement, the arrangement deserves a better implementation. But this isn't prohibitive by a longshot; Malcos summarizes nicely:

"Frenchy jazzy classicky thingy. Excellent arrangement, and the samples fit the instrumentation well. No brainer."

Imaginative arrangement combines with beyond-competent musicianship and a sense of humor to boot for a good time; you may prefer slow cars and cigars of non-Slavic origin, but you'll probably dig Karl's mix either way.

― djpretzel