ReMix:Final Fantasy IX "Hunter's Community Chest" 4:37

On 2/26/2023 at 12:28 AM, Liontamer said:

I thought I posted here, but I've kept track of the votes where I felt I was dead wrong (IIRC, it's 4), and this was one of them, which taught me an important lesson about appreciating dynamics within a narrower dynamic range. This was lo-fi before lo-fi was cool. Great stuff!

rereading the judges' decisions, it even spawned an important little discussion about judging priorities among you guys. this type of controversy is the stuff that keeps things and minds fresh, innit?

it resonates well with what i was trying to get across recently, in the "appreciation of OCR" thread.

lion, don't take it as a diss, but with the gazillion of things you judged, i'm sure you were dead wrong on more than 4 occasions. you'll only ever know it when you or someone else in your music appreciation circle comes to love the track in question later, and you come around to seeing it in a new light!

how many tracks did you judge in your jujtime? 5000? 10000? no one can ask of you to reevaluate all of those and gain new respect for whatever hidden gems were in there, but there could easily be 50-100 in there that got a pretty firm NO from you but might make you scratch your head at a later point.

personal disclaimer: i only submitted 5 tracks ever, and i was thankful that the panel could appreciate my first 4 attempts at the time...i made each of those tracks as good as i could, with my ability at the time.

the 5th one was a track i quite liked, but i realised it wasn't fully fleshed out. i actually submitted it partly because i was in the spirit of "ah fuck it, you're still afraid of getting a NO from the judges after 10 years on this site, that's so silly."

so from a personal standpoint, i never had trouble with the judging system. i also respect the 50:50 ratio for example, it's a good rule if you have to get nitty gritty.

but what about the gazillion of other tracks, a few of which bound to come from people with a very particular and quirky vision of music.

i don't think a margin of error of 1% is such a terrible thing to theoretically admit, with such a subjective thing as music no less.

P.S.: it's super funny that, and how, Prot NO'd this particular track. one of my OCR music heroes of old. i'd like to ask him if he'd still NO it these days. haha.

I thought I posted here, but I've kept track of the votes where I felt I was dead wrong (IIRC, it's 4), and this was one of them, which taught me an important lesson about appreciating dynamics within a narrower dynamic range. This was lo-fi before lo-fi was cool. Great stuff!

What even

IS

this?

I love trying to pick out all off the details in a song like this one. Love the textures. 10 smiles for you.

For me, the main draw is 3:14 - 3:36. Things get ridiculously fast here, like there's a contest to see how much the percussion can be pushed to the limit. Consequently, it's hard for me to keep my composure while listening to this section. Sometimes I'm in stitches; often I laugh; always I smile.

I concur with djp's comment that this could be labeled "music for nanomachines." It definitely has that robotic feel to it - in fact, after a ritardando climax characteristic of a number of Sam's arrangements, the last several seconds sound like an emergency signal going, "Abort mission. Retreat in progress..."

Electronically pensive and exploratory.

For the longest time I thought the intentionally muddy sound quality stood in the way of a great arrangement. It's still a bit like digging through the mud for goodies, but the warbly soundscape does give the track a peculiar feel of its own. This track forces you to listen to it closely. It sounds broken and muffled.. and weirdly old and nostalgic. I get a mental image of adventuring through partially undersea ruins. While being viewed from the side, in eight bits.

--Eino

I won't call it genius, but it's interesting to listen to for sure, and though the energy level is pretty static, mostly due to the encoding and samples, it never gets old.

No one makes mixes like Sam. 3

BEST BEGINNING OF A MIX EVER.

The beginning is maybe one of the most genius things I've ever heard in a piece of music. I'm being completely serious.

Ok, you may say "what the hell are you talking about?" But bear with me for a second. I just wanna talk about the guts it takes to do what Mr. Ascher-Weiss has done in the first 20 seconds or so in this mix. You're trying to figure out how to do a cool an intro to a song, to really get people eased into what's coming up. Usually if you have lo-fi samples you try to conceal their ugliness as much as possible with reverb or other fx and having more stuff going on in the arrangement to hide some of the ugliness. There are certain standards of sound quality on OCR, and you know that people can be really ouchy about that. And at the very least you usually want to establish some kind of stable rhythmic backing so that it at least sounds like you have some skill and know what you're doing.

This mix says a big "fuck you" to both of those and does the exact opposite. It isolates the two worst quality samples right at the beginning and makes them really rhythmically complex and unstable. And it's genius. It's genius because it's the best possible attention-grabbing thing that you could do, and it's also something that you would think no one in their right mind would ever do. I mean, why would you ever intentionally try to make stuff sound bad? But Sam does it here, and it works so well because he's patient. He knows what's coming and you don't, and he knows that you don't know so he exploits that as much as possible. It's tension and release, like what Vigilante said. He wants to draw people in before they get any kind of payoff. All this tension and release makes you feel like you've really gone somewhere and experienced something real and true. It may not have been the easiest experience to undertake, but you feel like you've really gone through something, and it makes you uneasy. But, as you realize later, it's a very moving sort of uneasiness.

I talked to Sam about this mix recently and he told me the intro was kind of accidental. He said there was something really complicated going on in the beginning that he got so frustrated with, so he decided to take out everything except the drums and the bass. Happy accidents can be lead to genius ideas, and the beginning of this mix is a prime example.

Also there is no way this would sound better with better samples. There's so much filtering and stuff going on, I don't even know what it would sound like. A lot different, that's for sure, and probably less good.

Anyway...after a ton of listens this is undoubtedly one of my favorite mixes on the site. Not everyone's gonna like it, but for weird people like me, I need to hear stuff like this. It's like heroin, if heroin made me a better person after doing it. Forget about Sam's talent for a second, I wish people would take some more risks and push themselves as far as Sam has here. Cause that's what being an artist is about. Damn, that's what being a human is all about.

It's taken me a lot of time to appreciate this on (including hearing the original in-game), and it's still not my favourites. I think the sound quality issue discussed extensively in the judging thread really brings this down for me. Well, I'll keep listening, perhaps it will start to shine for me too.

--Eino

I could swear the first few seconds were very boring and then it became a strange mess. I was about to turn it off, but then my mother called me to feed the dogs. So, while feeding the dogs, I listened to this conundrum, that actually made me come back and start it again.

The feel is so abstract you can't really see where it's going. The Hunter's Chance melody rings in every now and then, adding in some familiarity, then everything is back into chaos. It's an organized chaos, but I was surprised in this one really. I think my favorite part has to be the key change it gives it a synth-jazz-funk feel and this lasts for quite a while until it delves back into another key change into the melody.

Like natto, this song really does have an acquired taste, but it is phenomenal, nonetheless.

I remember first hearing this and thinking it was something I could appreciate musically, but not something I would be listening to years later. Well, I'm still bumping it to this day, and I practically rock out to all the crazy rhythms and tempo changes. This piece practically changed my whole perspective on music, and that is no hyperbole my friend.

Probably the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I'm so glad someone understands the progressive avant-gard style of music!

I don't know the piece but Shabablubahabwhateveryournameis... Nice, freaking mint.

It's a very very technical piece, instantly a favourite of mine, gorgeous, catchy, and fun.

I look forward to memorizing it as I did other thick IDM greats like Aphex Twin's 54 Cymru Beats or Squarepusher's Boneville Occident.

10/10, possibley my all-time favourite though I need to hear it a lot more.

And yeah. Word.

While I never commented, I've loved this song ever since I downloaded it on release, left it in a folder, burnt it to CD with my latest songs, and found it through study listening. What's this? This is awesome.

I think it's safe to say that Sam is my favourite remixer, and this piece is up there as his very best. Several listenings are in order, but once the song is engrained in your mind, putting Hunter's Community Chest on is bliss.

well, it was nearly rejected on the basis of sound quality. it's true, the samples are really crummy, and the arrangement would work with better ones. but it wouldn't be as charming.

on a purely logical basis, this song reminds me more than any of his other remixes of his original work (because it originally was, apparently) so i'd think i'd like it the most (i love his non-remix stuff more than any of his remixes)...but i got sorta bored of it.

wow, i just read the judges decision thread for this one--how can this not be instantly accepted? I think this is one of shnabubula's best works, and one of the best works on the site. I feel like Shnabubula's compositions teeter on the line between genius and insanity

I guess then again, it really took me a few good listens in the car to realize how incredible this is...

but seriously this is ridiculous