ReMix:Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars "Lies My Snifits Told Me" 4:32

XPRTNovice (Joe Zieja) took a radically different & intensively creative direction with his "Booster" arrangement on Super Mario RPG: Window to the Stars, converting a relatively simple, upbeat melody into a cinematic Himalayan sound poem that's mysterious, meditative, and masterful, which all begin with "m":

"I got asked to fill in a gap in the album for SMRPG, and this was the song I got handed. When I pulled up the tune to listen to it, I was a little put off. The source tune was really only something like 20 seconds long; it has only a few bars of melodically significant stuff going on, and the repetition within the source itself doesn't really have a lot of room for interpretation. Then I looked up Booster (having not played the game myself) and kind of thought that his story was a little tragic. So, instead of trying to do something complicated with it, I wanted to instead radically simplify the already simple. It sounded like a weird idea, but I think it ended up working. I wanted to go for something meditative and unlike anything I've done before. A man can only klezmer so hard."

Live free or klezmer hard ;) This was a polarizingly interpretive take which some folks loved & others found too dissimilar from the source. The melody's definitely in there, but it's been woven into a tapestry that speaks of mountains, monks, and mantras, with a cold, Zen aesthetic. I'm one of apparently five or maybe six people who actually liked Iron Fist, or at least didn't find it particularly worse than most of the other Netflix/Marvel shows, and I could see this standing in as the soundtrack for Danny Rand's K'un-L'un flashbacks. Sir_NutS writes:

"Wow... I LOVE THIS!

Unique, well crafted, your idea was delivered perfectly. The instrumentation is fantastic, everything is well performed and nothing I hear sounds overly sequenced. I found some of the voices to be less on the ambient side and probably more fitting to something more on the ethnic music side, but this is just a minor nitpick. Production is very clean, and the source, albeit heavily modified, it's there. TBH I'm a big fan of DJP's remix of this same song, but you've also done an excellent job while also going in a completely different direction. Pretty amazing."

Oh yeah, I mixed this one, too ;) One of the highlights of all the conventions I've attended was when Larry played this at a makeshift cosplay dance shindig at San Japan and one girl there was dancing like Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction. Joe's take couldn't possibly be more different than my own, and is certainly the more transformative/unorthodox arrangement, with 100% less fakeysax cheesegrowl. Of all the mixes on Window to the Stars, this was potentially the most liberal and least obvious in terms of approach, but I think it's a case of superb execution selling a challenging concept, and it was also neat to see Joe branch off in a whole other direction. Surprising, thought-provoking, & atmospheric stuff; an arranger's arrangement, perhaps, but actually rather easy to appreciate - if you keep an open mind, it'll open it further.