Star Fox "Dark Star"

Once you fall down the rabbit hole (foxhole? wormhole?) of our community's new Star Fox: Double Wing Damage album, it'll be difficult to pull yourself out! Case in point, Xaleph's "Dark Star", a psytrance trip of no return. :-) We've had incredible arrangements of exceedingly short source tunes on OC ReMix, so a salute to Xaleph finding inspiration from one of the original Star Fox's shortest source tunes in an extended journey toward the unknown:

"I had a lot of fun with this song. So, DFW stood up Star Fox as an album, and I figured let's look at the soundtrack. I heard a 5-second song and I thought, yes. The original song doesn't have a lot but it gave a lot of room to play with.

The goal was to make it sound like a black hole, have some gnarly sounding synths to make it feel weird and space-like, add a quote from James McCloud (because, you know, the story makes it makes sense), and take the 12/8 and 4/4 components and just play around with them.

My orchestra options aren't great - so I gave the MIDI to ZackParrish and he did a direct export of the MIDI to his orchestra VST from what I wrote. Shout out ZackParrish for orchestral feedback and rendering my MIDI for some of the instruments for better samples.

I wanted this to be the more space-oriented song of the five I have on this album - I'm hoping it definitely gives that feeling of space and unease (black hole and all).

Oh - neat fact, the term "Dark Star" was the first term for "Black Hole"."

Besides his customary play-by-play, judge prophetik music complimented Xaleph's iterative interpretation:

"opens with some futzy synths and creepy sfx and bass blaps. gnarly and space-like, check. 0:53 the beat drops and we realize we have been in the wrong meter the entire time - whoops! the super deep feel of the bass, super-clicky kick, and the shaker is a really intense combination. there's a break at 1:45 with some sfx and then suddenly we have orchestral elements. this has a similarly rhythmic, driving feel and the choir adds to the slight feeling of eeriness.

there's a transition back to electronic elements at 2:39 and this is even more driving now, with more percussive elements. by this point we've shifted instrumentation dramatically a few times and we have a few more ahead [...]

after one big blow section with a resonant lead, there's a hard drop at 4:44 into an outro that's mostly sfx.

this is a really interesting way to approach a very short, simple source. there's a lot of exploration here, which is fun since the original's kind of an exploratory sequence too. [...] nice work."

I personally dug the constant textural and genre shifts from Xaleph, all impressive and seamlessly executed expansion to gain light years of mileage from this theme, also hailed by judge and fellow Double Wing Damage contributor Hemophiliac:

"Xaleph does it again with another Xpansive performance. Xpanding upon the smallest amount of material and making it more interesting and more developed than the original. You have the Xcellent knack of knowing just when to change or add things to prevent the piece from getting boring and stale. Every time a pattern/loop feels like it's about to get to that point you change it up.

The orchestral section in the middle was a great deviation and not what I Xpected to hear in the middle of your dark psytrance style. Production is great as always, crystal clear.

Xcellent work."

Xactly, couldn't have xaid it any better. :-) I'm just shaking my head like, "How is he squeezing so much juice out of this theme???" You don't make any sense, Matt! :-P Xaleph's musical talents boggle the mind, and there's plenty more of his galaxy-brained creations to be discovered on Double Wing Damage, including all of the Star Fox: Assault and Star Fox Zero tributes. Don't straggle another minute; do a barrel roll and download Star Fox: Double Wing Damage!