ReMix: Pokémon Red 'TEEM.ROKIT'

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Ladies and gentlemen, Tweek has done the impossible. In the seven plus years OCR has existed, we've received quite a few Pokemon submissions, but while at times we've had some close calls, none have ever made it past the curmudgeonly judges panel and onto the site proper. No longer can accusations of the panel being haters of small, furry, mass-marketed creatures be considered credible, however, as Mr. Arnold's ReMix is here to represent in style. Jiggles McPuff, this one's for you! This is actually a revision of a previous effort Brian put together a good long while ago. The ReMixer writes:

"I decided to do a complete overhaul on the mix, and here you have it. I had just finished working on REAKTR.1 with sephfire and I was on a DnB fix, so I decided to stick with the genre and revamp this track (as you will probably notice the similar title names). I wanted to keep the same sense of uneasiness that the source and my original attempt possessed, but I wanted it to rock a bit harder. So, after a year, two months, and seven days, here is the final product!"

Awesome. Actually, when I was in the signature lineup at VGL in DC, I was evangelizing the site and how we had mixes from almost every game you could think of (marketing hyperbole, but we DO cover a lot), and this nine year-old asks me if we have any Pokemon, and... totally deflated. I had to explain that we're working on it. That we're failures, and that we go to sleep every night wallowing in our own inadequacies and dreaming of the day we can call ourselves men... more or less. Well, little buddy, wherever you are... your ship's come in!! I just hope you like DnB, as that's what Tweek's cooked up for you. Jesse's not really a fan of the Pokemon soundtracks, so his YES vote was rather colorful, and warrants repeating here, with apologies to "good taste":

"Yeah, so the thing with talented remixers remixing Pokemon...at the very best it's like you're molding the venus di milo out of a giant pile of poo. Sure you've got some chops, but you're putting them to waste on this crappy material. Imagine how much better your art could be if you had a better source to work with. I feel like this remix is a skanky hobag dolled up with makeup, sexy lingerie, a corset maybe, which make her look tappable under the dim maroon lights of a sleazy bar with a broken jukebox and a sticky floor, but tomorrow morning you KNOW you're gonna feel dirty."

... how visceral. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beer holder, and many intelligent folk surely differ with Mr. Taub's eloquent assessment of said source material, so let not his fecal comparisons trouble your delicate sensibilities. Lee had more topical, musical criticism to offer:

"You've simplified the mix a lot from the source. You have a rich soundscape going on here, I'm enjoying the thick textures and the crisp clear industrial sound. But there's really not a lot going on in terms of the arrangement. You flirt around with the synthy leads from the source in sections, but where you could've really built it up into something complex, you always jump away into a weird break or drum solo.

Take no fault from this. I really enjoy this mix and I think it's passable as it is. But it pains me to think that this could be a lot better than it is at the moment. ie: a little more work on the arrangement can push it from being a B track into an A+ track as far as I'm concerned. Really work on getting those crazy fast synths going in some of those sections."

I'd personally say that the strength of this track is in its similarity to REAKTR.1, as is its weakness; Tweek definitely drew perhaps too heavily on ideas and sounds from that arrangement here. However, given that so few have been able to push the Pokemon source into this realm, I'd qualify such critiques with a dose of kudos for being able to arrange such apparently troublesome source material into pretty kicking electronica. Larry didn't like the reverse section at 2:44-2:51, but I sort of felt like it was riskier than some of the other production decisions and added some character, albeit of a rather odd persuasion. The whole piece has a sort of enigmatic, shadowy feel to it, lacking dominant melodic direction; it's more of an expanded BGM that snakes in and out over a complex bed of dark textures and percolating beatwork. However, Tweek can make that sort of thing work rather well, and does so here, earning him the fame/infamy of having the first Pokemon ReMix on the site. It may not cause epileptic seizures or earn Brian great gobs of cash money (or any, for that matter), but it's pretty tight nonetheless, and thus: We choose you! Tweekachu!

...

ouch.

― djpretzel