Doom Remix

While we're on a VGMix-type "tip", I thought I'd point out The Dark Side of Phobos, OCR's Doom Remix project. Robert Prince and John Romero's brittle rock tracks from the original game get stomped all over by a veritable legion of OverClocked guys. The Best Remixer Name Ever Award has to go to the wonderfully monikered "ArseAssasin", who apparently, "first grew interested in electronic music by listening to Village People."

Game remix stuff usually churns up an amazing bevy of insane programming, total rhythmic and melodic dyslexia, and sounds that no human mind is capable of processing. No exceptions here, then. It's a bananas mix of actual rock and metal (with guitars and everything - check out Evil Horde's bonkers cutup "Hangarmageddon", which sounds like [simile]Gary Moore's disembodied head being used as a football by demons whilst Amigas fall on them from metal shelves[/simile]), dark ambience and general software-synth grinding.

I've always been a fan of the remixing scene because it gives people a way into production that they wouldn't otherwise have, and also helps to canonise and reintroduce some classic game tunes. Larger-scale projects like this help to galvanise the scene and generate external publicity, and that can only be a good thing.