ReMix:Contra "Contravirt" 7:25

So I decided as a bit of an experiment to listen to some of the older remixes on the site, and i've been going through them chronologically. As you can imagine, there's a lot of... variable quality tracks - much of it is amateurish and/or dated yet many of them have a charm to them, and there's some decent stuff, some novelty tracks, some have some cool humour to them... but then this one came on and I'm kinda shocked.

This sounds like something that could have been posted to the site 10 years later. Sounds like a professional, well mixed, very ambitious remix that's executed incredibly. Yeah it almost shows it's age with some samples but it's so far ahead of everything else that you barely notice.

Listening to this along side everything on the site today, I think it's easy to take this for granted because of how the quality of fan arrangements has improved over the years, but this was posted in june of 2000, which is absolutely bonkers.

Virt really was showing everyone up even twenty years ago huh.

On 4/16/2015 at 6:37 PM, djpretzel said:

Embarrassing admission: at the time I read RIGHT over the title pun. I literally thought Jake had just combined the game name and his pseudonym into one nonsense word...

Yeah

and what a perfect pun to introduce said person...? nice coincidence, considering jake's overall (hi)story arc with OCR. wouldn't you say?

also, pretty fucking groundbreaking in the medley department, for a tune from 2000. but well it's virt, what to expect. it's conceivable how to come up with this in 2000, but still, impressive!

good grief this is sooooooo good. I listened to it years ago and re-found it today. Amazing segues into the different stages too.

Man, Jake Kaufman was so ahead of his time when it comes to the music on this site. I was kind of critical of another medley of his I reviewed, Funk Fusion. But this Contra medley is just all kinds of amazing. It was very interesting to hear the original music in parts blend right in with Kaufman’s music. Perhaps the amount of effort and production placed in this track was foreshadowing his eventual involvement in the Contra 4 soundtrack?

*heart eyes* virt you lovely bastard, killing it even in the year 2000. Lovely integration of chiptunes and not-that, quite a delicious soundscape. And, I mean its hard for medleys to NOT do this but I do like how this takes you on a bit of a journey, through the game and through your life. Doesn't even seem as long as it is, in the best possible way. Super dynamic and interesting. I'm sorry I just have nothing but good things to say about virt in general.

(I had no idea the name was a pun either... wasn't even sure controvert was a word but I guess we all learned something today, months apart)

Embarrassing admission: at the time I read RIGHT over the title pun. I literally thought Jake had just combined the game name and his pseudonym into one nonsense word...

Yeah

Sweet, it's almost like the "Unsealed" of Contra. Virt has always been a musical master, and it shows here with his ability to combine all those sources together in a nice package. Sounds good for it's age as well. Nice one.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.