ReMix:Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana "Silver Sands" 6:22

From the hotly-contested & (particularly) badass Dwelling of Duels: Free Month (April 2021) comes our first featured mix of Ys 8, an epic symphonic rock arrangement of "Sunshine Coastline" from Ivan Hakštok:

"What's up, I haven't submitted anything in a while, so here's something recent. It's a pretty straightforward cover... except for the orchestral intro and the 6/4 section going into the guitar solo at the 4:10 mark, but I think there should be enough original stuff in there for OCR standards.

I wanted to cover this tune for quite a while now, but I wasn't skilled enough to play it nicely... fortunately, the rising quality of Dwelling of Duels pushed me to improve. This song placed 5th out of 43 entries in the April 2021 Free Month, probably one of the strongest duels in DoD history. Hope you enjoy it!"

Many excellent goings-on lately in the DoD-sphere, so mosey on over there & check it all out when you get a minute or sixty. This is some of Ivan's best non-rock/metal work in terms of the orchestral bits, which open strong & have that grandiose, cinematic vibe before morphing. Liontamer's got the eval & rundown:

"Nice work by Ivan; this is definitely what he said it was, i.e. structurally conservative, but a quality adaptation of the theme with subtly different backing textures that are more in the orchestral rock realm, bookended by the more interpretive opening and closing. The source tune's got a hard-charging pace that Hakštok was all about retaining, and congrats to him for pulling off an impressive DoD showing; it certainly sounds like a difficult theme to perform on guitar, but all of Hakštok's lead work was on point. Just like OCR, the DoD community has also pushed so many artists like Ivan into setting goals and honing skills with easily observable results like this. Great modern source tune choice, and we're always down with powerful works from the Ys series!"

What he said; fun, energized, & substantive symphonic rock sandwich - over six minutes of ooomph, with contrasting orchestral bread on either end & some searing guitar hero action in between = delicious!