ReMix:Celeste "Courage in the Dark" 4:03

Lena Raine's known for loads of modern classics in VGM already, with Celeste's "Resurrections" being chief among them (and Beastieball on the way!). It's got Final Fantasy "Prelude" vibes in the intro, and the track builds for a quite a while before taking a turn halfway through to present another great motif. With loads of substance to choose from, we've got a genteel, small ensemble adaptation of "Resurrections" by Rebecca Tripp, who now ties OCR founder djpretzel for the most arrangements on the site with 82 (I almost wrote "Whoa, eighty-f*ckin'-two, holy sh*t!" and stopped myself... or did I :-D)! Dunno the music of Celeste? Find the courage to try this out and you won't be disappointed. As Rebecca notes, the influence of Yasunori Mitsuda's also felt here:

"This is my first Celeste arrangement, based on "Resurrections", which I have named "Courage in the Dark". The original soundtrack was composed by Lena Raine. I think I took a lot of inspiration from Chrono Cross on this one! Strawberries are my favourite fruit. ^_^

This track was nominated and voted for by my patrons on Subscribestar. If you're interested in voting/nominating in the future, you can subscribe to me here: https://subscribestar.com/rebeccaetripp. A new VGM remix will be chosen every month."

There were some hitches I and other Js pointed out re: uncanny valley sample articulations, but, man, Rebecca's offered up strong string writing and percussion & choir ornamentation that align so nicely with the mood of Raine's original adapted to EP & woodwinds, as Emunator (who himself debuted the game on OCR) noted in his vote:

"I love how the delicate instrumentation cascades over the backing arpeggios. It's very tender and, for the most part, pretty well-produced if not fully realistic on the sequencing. I realize that my Celeste bias might be influencing this somewhat, but after some deliberation, I feel that there's plenty of minor modulations to the writing, and the change in instrumentation also contributes to the level of personalization."

So many strawberry-flavored highlights to choose from here, from the lovely EP at the opening, the immediate fluttering personalization of the melody at :29, Rebecca copious yet gorgeous trademark chime accents, the tempo slowdown at 1:43, the pivot to the source's second half at 2:18, or the idea of the quiet, isolated textures from 3:15-3:28 before filling things back out towards the finish.

If we ever do another Kickstarter, adapting and augmenting more of Rebecca's arrangements with live performers (as she's expertly done in the past) would be a very worthy goal. As an army of one though, Tripp's more than capable of entering the battle and disarming the enemy with delicate, delightful, inspired interpretations. :-) Maybe djp will submit some of his past album tracks that haven't been posted yet to stay competitive for the top spot on "ReMix Count Mountain", but that summit's flag is gonna be all Rebecca's very, very soon. She doesn't play around, she doesn't share -- she creates, she climbs, and she keeps it movin'!