Music Monday: Suite for Violin and Piano (Metroid)

Last week's feature was an arrange album by Samuel Ascher-Weiss, a.k.a. Shnabubula, and it was so good that I could almost just devote Music Monday to tracks from NES JAMS for the next three months or so. Despite my desire to highlight more of Shnabubula's amazing work, however, one of my goals for this segment is to maintain variety from week to week. So, my compromise is to show off another of Shnabubula's pieces, with a different tone than we heard in NES JAMS.

Suite for Violin and Piano, performed by Shnabubula and Gabriel Terracciano, is a medley featuring tracks from the Metroid Series. Clocking in at over ten minutes, this incredible piece proves to be an adventure as rich in atmosphere and tension as the games they honor.

Title: Suite for Violin and Piano
Game: Metroid (series)
Arranged by Shnabubula and Gabriel Terracciano

Music Monday: Shnabubula's NES JAMS

I listen to a lot of fan remixes and arrangements, especially those coming out of Overclocked Remix, but there aren't a great deal of remix artists that I actually recognize by name. "Shnabubula" (Samuel Ascher-Weiss) is a name I knew I had seen a lot of, but I didn't really know his style or works from the name alone. After discovering his latest solo album, NES JAMS, however -- I'll be paying a lot more attention.

NES JAMS is a combination piano and chiptune collection, presenting creative interpretations of music from classic NES games like Double Dragon, Zelda, Mega Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Castlevania, to name a few. While there are a range of tones and styles at work, it generally hugs pretty closely to jazz and progressive ideals with an impressively frantic energy. I love it. I feel like this album was made for me.

The whole thing can be enjoyed, for free, on the album's release page, or it can by purchased for download at whatever price and format one chooses (I'm not sure if there is even a set minimum).

Music Monday: Ovelia's Worries

This week's piece was selected for a few different reasons:

1) Hitoshi Sakimoto's unforgettable music in Final Fantasy Tactics has never received a "piano collections" album (or any additional attention outside the OST, actually). I still remember the first time I played FFT on the Playstation, and having two distinct feelings: first, that the game was way more complex and difficult than any FF game I'd handled before -- and second, that the music matched this sophistication. The gameplay refused to dumb itself down for those who couldn't survive the trial-by-fire of its intricate, strategy-based battles -- and indeed, it wouldn't think twice about leaving stragglers behind. The music served meritably as a reward in and of itself for those who kept up.

2) The featured piece, Ovelia's Worries, is just one of a handful of piano arrangements by Casey Ormond. His YouTube channel hosts a variety of game music that he's adapted for piano, and it's worth listening to as well. Ormond has proven himself as not only a skilled performer, but someone who can rewrite a piece, add his own touches and decorations, and expand on the source material in a fitting manner.

3) Ormond's talents haven't only garnered the admiration of fans. Thanks to his proven skills, he was hired to rework more of Sakimoto's music in an official capacity, through the Valkyria Chronicles: Piano Pieces album. I'll definitely be grabbing this one soon -- apparently it's available on the US iTunes store (though not on the Canadian store, so I'm still figuring out what I need to do to access it).

Title: Ovelia's Worries

Game: Final Fantasy Tactics (released January 1998, North America)

Originally Composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto

Arranged by Casey Ormond