ReMix: Blaster Master 'Fear My Lowering Coefficient of Friction'

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Armcannon (homepage, MySpace) is one of an emergingly popular group of VGM "cover" bands... and they're good. Larry and I were kicking ourselves for missing them at T-MODE back in September (found out about the whole convention the day after), but the good news is that all of you coming to MAGfest VI in January can look forward to seeing them there. Trust me, the stuff you hear on their MySpace, while excellent, is just the beginning, and like Powerglove, Year 200X, This Place is Haunted, and many more, they're amazing live.

This seems like an appropriate place to comment on the whole cover band thing, which has taken off more recently as events like PAX realized that having live performances of game music could really liven things up. There's often some confusion as to the difference between "covers" and "arrangements" (or our "ReMix" misnomer), and often the line is pretty damn blurry. I think some in the cover band scene have gotten offended when their stuff wasn't right for OCR, and that's unfortunate. I've been called worse things than an elitist before, but I think it should be pretty clear that I dig video game music, and in general the popularity it's been getting lately - definitely in part to cover bands - is a good thing. Nevertheless, some seem to walk away with the notion that because OC ReMix favors arrangement (we do), we must secretly hate cover bands (we don't), etc. It's silly. Of course, there's also the whole rock vs. techno argument, which incidentally shoves aside jazz, classical, and a number of other genres (kudos to Select Start for rocking the live, classical angle!)... often, guitar players seem to want to reduce electronica artists to knob-tweaking auto-pilot FruityLoops and Reason users who select a few presets then press the magical "remix" button and in under an hour have a completed track. On the other hand, electronica artists might sometimes characterize guitar players as musical egotists who ignorantly denounce all that is not played live as crap, and who use "artistic license" as an excuse for unpolished production.

Sigh. Fortunately, life's not that easy: trying to put people into neat, little groups usually results in ignorance, lost opportunity, and unnecessary bullshit. While sweeping generalizations can and will be made, and may have ounces of truth to them at times, the bigger picture is that most of us love music, love games, and love game music. We also love what we're doing, whether we're focusing our efforts on reintrepeting and reinventing game music, helping it take new forms and go in new directions, or engaging in balls to the wall, rockout nostalgia live on stage, where subtlety might occasionally take a backseat to being loud and kicking ass. I've seen posts on other forums, especially following the release of Voices, where fans of some cover bands were painting a picture of a world where it was either us or them, cover bands or game arrangements, and one was necessarily "better" than the other. I don't know what fuels such comments, or how such an apples-to-oranges comparison can seem sane, but I do know that I feel lucky for being able to appreciate both. Call me crazy, but I (obviously) love what we're doing here at OCR, and I also love what these bands are doing, and that's that.

Alright, down off my soapbox. I felt that no one had made such a statement, and it needed to be made. So, it's especially awesome when we get some crossover action, and a group or individual known primarily for live performances and tracks that might lean towards "cover" status (again, gray area) submits something to OC ReMix that works with what we're doing. In this case Danimal Cannon (Daniel Behrens), of Armcannon, sent us a Blaster Master mix, it rocked, it jived with our standards, and we're posting it. The ReMixer writes:

"This track was originally composed for the Dwelling of Duels competition, under the Fire vs Ice theme. I had been meaning to do a Blaster Master track for quite a while, and the opportunity presented itself nicely. Some of the inspiration for the artistic liberties found in this track was taken from listening to Stemage's Metroid Metal remixes. His creativity with rhythm combined with interesting chord progressions inspired me to push myself as well with those values. A lot of the original ideas I had stemmed around the idea of putting new chords and rhythm underneath a variation on the source track's main melody, which is a staple of my remixing style in my opinion."

Awesome mix, awesome mix title. You've got searing, soaring leads, creative integration of synths (with some weird-but-cool DSP/panning), and - most importantly - an arrangement that takes the original and really goes places with it. It's meaty rock, it's got energy to spare, and it's Blaster Master, which we haven't seen for awhile in these parts. Furthermore, it's from an artist who's part of an amazing band that you owe it to yourself to check out and, if at all possible, catch live.

― djpretzel