ReMix:Street Fighter II: The World Warrior "Club del Toro" 5:11

I'm gonna step out of my role of writing mix writeups and even to some extent running OCR to express condolences and share with our listeners news that ReMixers Avien (Chris Powell) and Charles Blachly passed away in the last two years, Charles in April of 2003 and Chris recently on September 10th of this year. I was only recently informed of this information. I make no grand claims to have known either very well, but to whatever extent you can know someone from their music, brief emails, and general interest in what OCR's about, both deaths come as a surprise and are very saddening. We talk about OCR as a community, and to some extent that's true for many of the listeners, mixers, forumgoers, judges, etc. that spend a large amount of time here, but it's also a community in the larger sense in that, even for those who aren't as intimately involved with OCR specifically, there's something of a bond simply on the basis of sharing a common interest in games and game music, and in discovering a place where those interests are endorsed and expressed. I'm glad both of them spent some portion of their far too brief lives interacting with this community, and hope the work they contributed to it was reciprocated back to them in some way.

My apologies to Razya for introducing his mix with this very depressing news which is unrelated to his excellent electronica mix of Vega's theme from Street Fighter 2. These writeups have a narrative thread to them, and sometimes this means mixing in news that could be both non-sequitir and/or disturbing, depressing, frustrating, etc. with a mix that has no direct connection. As important as it is to reflect on losses, however, time marches on. This deceptively simple club/trance mix from Rayza takes on the theme of Spanish claw-wielding prettyboy Vega, or Balrog if you're Japanese, who had the unique honor of participating in the Street Fighter 2 animated movie's quintessential scene, also known as the "Gratuitous Chun Li Shower Experience", before getting severely whooped. The singular McV covered this theme in a surprising R'n'B ballad style once upon a time, which worked, but fortunately the original lends itself to this more club-friendly adaptation just as readily. This isn't an ornate, layered, intricate, subtle affair, and some may say that Rayza's used mostly staple trance foods in the piece's construction, not deviating wildly or coloring outside the lines much. That'd be accurate, actually - this isn't an evolution or a revolution, relative to the mixer's own ouvre or other mixes on the site, but it's just damn well-built. Solid, through and through, with nary a nick or scratch. Things intro with a meat-and-potatoes kick and octave bass, along with a lovely little dirty synth and some backwards claps or fx of some sort. When the beat and accompanying filtered synth patterns come in, there's a nice club feel that lives up to the mix title, with meaty beats that envelope the gliding synth lead that comes in for melody afterwards. One thing I might have done differently is used a different lead patch for what I'd call the chorus, as this glide lead does end up dominating the melodic real estate, where sharing it may have helped make the different portions more distinct. We get a cool breakout section with the country names announced in that famous, way-too-enthusiastic voice and some great rapid-fire gating that does superfast triplets and adds to the intensity. Things do repeat a bit, but they're solid enough to survive the reiteration, and for the last minute or so there's a nice countermelody doing its thing, along with the excellent, very syncopated percussion being more exposed and easier to fully appreciate in its own right. In fact, my comment about this not being layered should be retracted, because percussively and in terms of the synth gating, there's really quite a bit of detail and interlocking parts making this thing tick. The overall presentation is more direct and staple genre, but these aspects in particular are very honed and beneficial. One pictures the somewhat sedate crowd in Vega's caged background getting a little rowdy, a disco ball lowering, some strobe lights firing up, and the fighting being postponed for some impromptu grooving to the substantive number of rhythmic hooks Rayza's vacuum-packed in here. Excellent, danceable, sugar-coated SF2 electronica.