ReMix:Stray "W3 4RE TH3 ROB0TS" 4:20

Time to finally round out our blitz of newcomers via a special arrangement coupled with some great timing! Newcomer TheManPF debuts from Argentina, but he's far from alone, tag-teaming with veteran ReMixer Katajun and fellow OCR newbies newmajoe, Zach Chapman, AND Zach's cat Misty for the most apropo OC-ReMix-to-nascent-global-holiday crossover ever! In 2019, the UK-based Yorkshire Cat Rescue decided to create International Rescue Cat Awareness Month, along with declaring March 2nd International Rescue Cat Day. How can we celebrate this special day to the max? We've got a radical, far out disco spin on the most fitting new indie game out there, BlueTwelve Studio & Annapurna Interactive's Stray, with a soundtrack originally scored by fellow OC ReMixer Yann van der Cruyssen!

• Arrangement, lyrics, sequencing, mix, guitars, and vocals (vocoder) by TheManPF
• Bass by Zachary Chapman
• Vocals (talk box) by Katajun
• Alto sax by Joe Newman
• Cat meows by Misty (the cat)

With our feline-friendly lineup in place, TheManPF gives us the lowdown on how he was hustled into taking the mild-mannered music of a dystopian game about a kittie & robots and transmuting it into a freaky deaky disco dancing machine:

"This is a disco/rock/jazz arrangement of "Cool Down" and "Ballad of the Lonely Robot" from the 2022 video game Stray. The idea behind the arrangement was doing a disco version (a style I had never done before) of a couple of short songs from the Stray soundtrack, inspired by Daft Punk and by some prominent artists from Dwelling of Duels like Katajun and DoD Music Factory. To achieve the style, I make heavy use of vocoders.

For this track, I wrote the entirety of the arrangement, wrote all of the lyrics, played all the guitars, did vocals (with vocoders) for everything except the chorus, and mixed/mastered it. Zach Chapman plays bass, as well as being the one who suggested the idea of doing a Stray song, he's also the one who provided original recordings of cat meows, done by his own cat Misty. Katajun does vocals in the chorus through the use of a talk box. newmajoe plays sax in the middle of the song, as well as doing an improvised solo.

This arrangement was originally done for Dwelling of Duels, a VGM cover competition, in August 2022, in which it won 2nd place out of 25 total tracks."

Practically any high placers from Dwelling of Duels compos (running since 2003 and coming up on 20 years in action!) are gonna be groovy as far as OCR's arrangement & production standards are concerned, so we're stoked to welcome yet another stellar band of Shizzies! Judge Emunator handled the evaluation, and was grinning like a Cheshire cat:

"Oh yeaaaaaahhhhh. I'm blown away by how you managed to take two extremely simple, low-key source tunes and transform them into something so fundamentally different, yet immediately recognizable. The low-key chord progression from Cool Down feels like it was practically born to live a second life as a disco tune. Going from an instrumental-only tune into a vocal-driven one can frequently yield clunky results, but each of the respective source melodies fit like a glove into the verse/chorus format of a more traditional song structure here, bypassing any potential awkwardness entirely. I initially assumed that the lyrics were pulled directly from the source tunes, and was surprised to read that they were all new additions, if that gives any indication of how natural the conversion feels.

Your guest musicians are all putting in work too. Zach's bass performance keeps it classy and elevates this beyond what might be possible with a sequenced bassline, and those dueling guitar and saxophone solos from 1:49-2:53 are purring. Really love this track, makes me wanna play the game. This is how you do it - bravo to everyone (including Misty) for a definitive, spirited debut!"

Emu's alright alright and outta sight about how off the hook this collab turned out, but also right on re: how well "Cool Down" as the verses click with "Ballad of the Lonely Robot" as the choruses. And with the vocoder and talk box singing being less about understanding the words, traditional haters of lyrics in their game music are certainly less likely to be jive turkeys and bummers like they usually are! :-D Be bad muthas instead by spreading good vibes about the greatness of VGM vocals, especially TheManPF's "We Are the Robots", can you dig it?

And can we also entice you -- by way of the boogie -- to copy cool cat Zach Chapman and take in your *own* stray kitty kitty looking for a happy home? (Google & Petfinder have the skinny.) If you wanna keep on truckin' with cat-based chillaxin', this isn't our only ReMix from a game involving cats. That said, you might not get quite the same frisky feeling from Magnetic Ether's dark metal mutation of The Cat Lady... Peace out! ;-)