ReMix:Super Mario Bros. 2 "Shiitake Kingdom" 2:32

MARIO, MARIO, MARIO, MARIO, MARIO!!

We hope you're enjoying Worlds Apart, and of course we already kicked off our flood month celebrations with a sweet five-mix run of Nintendo arrangements, but it's not every year we get to celebrate Mario's 30th anniversary, Mario Maker just came out, and thus we've got an amazing FIVE-MIX MARIO FLOOD!! After all, any memorable flood is going to involve at least a few plumbers, right? Five different Mario games, nine artists (including three newcomers), and a diverse range of styles make this a GREAT flood that serves as a pretty good microcosm for the diversity & creativity OCR encourages!

We start with newcomer Fxsnowy (Adrian Bureu), who doki-dokis it up with a playful world/jazz SMB2 arrangement that employs a wide gamut of Asian instrumentation:

"I think this is the first ReMix I ever tried making, about 3 or 4 years ago. Decided to rework on it and resubmit with great help from the forums. I decided to remix a really catchy Mario Bros. song that, interestingly, only one person has covered. I mixed some Asian instruments like the erhu, the Chinese guzheng, the Japanese koto, and the Chinese ruan moon guitar to give it an Oriental feel. Hope you guys like it!"

I love the Pan-Asian musical cooperation going here; if only China-Japan relations were so harmonious IRL. At a hair over two & a half minutes, this is a brief, upbeat, & plucky (in more ways than one) piece that retains the tone & charm of the source while not only swapping out the instrumentation but (critically important) altering the arrangement to SUIT said instrumentation. It might seem obvious, but if you just take a source tune and swap the instruments out for Asian, African, Latin, etc. instrumentation, you do NOT get something that evokes those regions.... at all. Articulations, intonations, techniques - these are all key to making things click, and incidentally also key to making the most of sample libraries in general. Liontamer writes:

"Some of the instrumentation would never pass as real (e.g. pizz strings, koto articulations), but the samples were used very well and came off very expressive. Some could say the soundscape was thin, but I thought it was more delicate than thin and the background was filled out nicely. Nice work, Adrian! Welcome aboard! :-)"

While this doesn't end up sounding "OMG Super Authentic!!," as if a group of Chinese & Japanese session musicians got together and just started jamming to the source, there's enough attention to detail paid to each part that the various playing techniques come through and create a fun, respectful, & musical vibe. Congrats to Adrian on a distinct & enjoyable debut - it's a neat concept, it's developed enough in 2'31" to provide a satisfying experience with direction, it's a lesser-mixed but still (for everyone but Larry) a pretty recognizable source, and it's just plain old fun!