ReMix:Mario Paint "Intense Color" 4:18

Speaking of intense color, and in keeping with today's cinematic motif, be sure to smell... or, rather, see Ultraviolet - it sets a new benchmark for the "let's have Milla randomly attack things against multicolored backgrounds" genre, which is really starting to be taken seriously by film connoisseurs. Fortunately, sephfire and SGX put a little more thought (read: at least some) into this, their latest ReMix and our first Mario Paint coverage for several years. Quoth the mix's initiator, sephfire:

"This remix probably isn't what most people would expect to hear from source material like Mario Paint. I'm not even completely sure what musical genre this remix is, but it was darn fun to make and it gave me the opportunity to butcher classic Mario tunes. Big thanks to NNY for making the request and to SGX for offering to help take this remix to the next level. After working together with him on various projects, it's an honor to finally have an official collaboration to submit to OCR. Enjoy!"

SGX explains his role:

"Sephfire sent me his remix a while back asking for comments. I liked it a lot and thought that I could add some to it and make it sound much more powerful, so I offered to do so with his input. I mainly worked in Acid Pro 5 bouncing pieces from sephfire's Reason file into the project so I could do all kinds of odd drum chopping, reverb distortions, reverses, pads, distorted sounds and the like. I just in general made stuff sound evil. It was great fun because I had sephfire's awesome stuff to work with."

The result lives up to its moniker, as there's general sonic intensity and a variety of auditory tricks and flips performed, though the tone remains consistently kickass. Mario Paint indeed isn't the easiest material to work with, so an expansionist approach is almost necessitated. Andy comments:

"A lot of this reminds me of BT of course, particularly the stuttering. The arrangement is really good too considering the simplicity of the original. The ReMixers really took it in a whole new direction. One could argue that at times it's TOO far but there are enough cameos of the different motifs from the original that I think that argument would not work. Structurally, there's a lot of motion and the whole thing is arranged logically in terms of dynamics and 'energy'"

It's definitely on the outskirts of liberal arrangement, but there's enough Italian plumber in there to still come off legit. The chiptunish bookend intro/outro works particularly well in this instance, as it's mangled presence segues into stark marcato strings and then wildly aggressive synth textures at 0'22"; it also closes things out appropriately. This is *great* driving music, perfect for a cruise on the freeway (at completely legal speeds, of course), and the boomerang fake ending (of sorts) at 3'34" is just plain neat. MP is tricky material, but when two complimentary forces like seph and SGX join up, you know the result is at the very least going to be fun to listen to. It's very polarized towards production and away from arrangement, but that imbalance makes a bit more sense for this brand of source material. Very aggressive and enjoyable stuff - I'd have preferred their combined talents been focused on game music with a little more substance to it, to allow for increased symbiotic hooks into a richer melodic host, but as-is this is still one kickin' ride.