ReMix: Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse 'In the Beginning There Was Jazz'

Download MP3
3,899,321 bytes, 4:06, 127kbps

• Trade-in your Games or Anime DVDs!
• OC ReMix Shirts & Merch
• Games:
  • DS | GBA | GC | PS2 | WII | XBOX | 360
  • Imports & Pre-owned
• Anime:
  • DVDs & Merchandise

Absolutely fantastic jazz CV3 mix from Shnabubula and a trio he's part of, LSD (Lenwood Turner, Samuel Ascher-Weiss and Dustin Kaufman.) Incidentally, the Swiss chemist who discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD recently passed away at the age of 102. Regardless of your opinion on illegal drugs, one at least has to acknowledge the considerable impact they've had on modern music. As another aside, I'd like to say - if it isn't abundantly clear from my writeups of his work - that I've got the utmost respect for Sam as a composer & musician. He's one of those guys for whom the term "genius" actually doesn't seem like hyperbole. Unfortunately, outside of the music, he's made some bad decisions recently involving attempts to hack the site and compromise user accounts that he may not have been directly involved in, but that he neglected to warn me about when he had ample opportunity to do so. For the record, I don't think he r bad men or anything of that ilk, but I know that I want to spend my (very limited) free time working to make OC ReMix better and posting music, not dealing with problems that arise out of mistrusting those who have different priorities. 'Nuff said.

Speaking of priorities: Music. Blissful, organic, Castlevanian jazz music. You'll find it right here. I'm a huge fan of jazz quartet Neskvartetten, but if they have a downside, it's in their source material to date being restricted to Nintendo/Koji Kondo. There's tons to work with there, but there are still genres/composers/games that go untapped on so strict a diet. I mention this because this mix sounds not unlike what I'd expect Neskvartetten to come up with for CV3, albeit sans additional instrumentation. In other words, it's damn good. Lenwood Turner isn't on this particular track, so it's a duo, not a trio... I supposed it's really "SD" and not "LSD", which could be Secure Digital, Super-Deformed, or a variety of less hip acronyms. So you get "only" piano and drums, but both musicians are fully capable of making that combination fill up the entire space, with tons of left-handed rhythm work from Shna and some extraordinarily organic, tight drums from Dustin. It's a very brief moment in an arrangement that's full of them, but check out the lone snare hit at about 0'48" - it seems for just a split second like they're gonna turn it into a stadium rock motif bit, but it's reigned right back in. The meat-and-potatoes, easily identifiable stuff here is still fantastic, with plenty of syncopation and emotion being infused into the original, but the soloing is phenomenal. Even at a respectable four minutes, this feels short, not because it doesn't accomplish a lot, go places, and sound absolutely classy the whole way through, but because you just want... more. Fantastic arrangement, performance, and recording that I wouldn't feel cheated hearing at a jazz club - with a high cover charge - any day of the week.

― djpretzel