Artists, such as the geeks on OCReMix, need a good name. My lawyer suggested I change my name to something easier for a jury to symphathize with, and I got the idea for a name contest. I’m well aware that nobody reads my blog. Yet. When the OCR community does find it, it’ll be all the more interesting for them to read. This could be amusing for them, not just judgemental.

The first category I will judge in is long names. The two longest I found was Children of the Monkey Machine and Cuddly Battleship Kattywampus. In order to avoid looking evolution-friendly in front of potential biblical fundamentalists, I have to choose CBK. This is good practice if I ever run for president of America. I have yet to be born in America, but considering I might yet be born again, it shouldn’t be a problem.

The second category is two-letter names. With a number of those (AE, JV, MC, mp, mv, OA, and po! (listed only because the third symbol isn’t a letter)), it shouldn’t be hard. We’ll disqualify the transliterated umlaut, the cheesy MC, the one alluding to magic/mana points, and the one with more than two symbols, leaving us with JV, mv, and OA. Lowercase names seem a little lazy, and most good names contain vowels, so I’m gonna go with OA.

For the third category, I will decide the best use of non-letter symbols. Replacing letters with numbers are overused, although the existance of both a Beej and a B33J make the latter worth mentioning. Adding numbers to the end of the name is a bit 90’s. Actually, using numbers is lame. There, I said it. po! deserves an honorary mention here for not using numbers. Despite being a bit 90’s, J:/Drive has to win this one.

There are two kinds of funny artist names: the cheesy stupid ones, and the amusing ones. The aforementioned Cuddly Battleship Kattywampus deserves an honrary mention here, as does A Scholar & A Physician (a real abbreviation, too), the former for being cheesy stupid to the point that it’s funny again, the latter for being an unorthodox name and depth. The win, however, goes to Jupiter Crayons for the obvious reason.

Finally, there’s the coolest name on OCR. I have a hard time deciding what the coolest name is. Back in the days, it might have been something with a  double-X, something awesome just spelled out, something far off the beaten path, or some really cool ordinary name, but I think slightly longer names are the thing nowadays, and so are the two names I’m considering for this title, Another Soundscape and Symphonic Chronicles. DragonAvenger gets an honorary mention.

D’oh! They’re both losers. The winner is Sixto Sounds.

Perhaps I should recommend their music as well, but I have to admit there’s some whose remixes I wouldn’t. They’re worth exploring, to see how many were actually worth it, if not for actually listening. And that concludes the OCR artist name contest.

Let’s talk about fan arrangement albums, and naturally the ones on OCReMix. I was thinking of listening to each and writing something of a review of them. Chronologially, starting from the first.

The first album on OCR is Relics of the Chozo (official site), a Super Metroid album. Protricity, the director of the project, has 9 remixes on the project, not counting collaborations. It’s safe to say it’s a Protricity album.

With varying styles, mostly orchestral vgm and atmospheric synth tracks, it’s an interesting album, fitting of the source.

The album is consisted of 19 tracks by, aside from Protricity, Adhesive_Boy, Avien, Children of the Monkey Machine, Daniel Baronowsky, Prophecy, Suzumebachi, Vigilante, and zyko.

It should be mentioned that the amount of protricitic tracks is IIRC due to the failure of other remixers to devote the necessary time and energy, or skill, to the project.

RotC is a good album with scary, alien music. While not all players can play .ogg files, which the project was released in, several of the tracks are available on OCR, and those should get you interested enough to find yourself an ogg player.

My lawyer didn’t, tho.

The most celebrated and famous composer of today might not be dead. I’m talking about the legend Nobuo Uematsu, Japanese video game composer. While his life and works might be fantastically interesting, I’m concerned about his fans.

OCReMix has a number of Nobuo-fanatics, such as Children of the Monkey Machine, mp, FFMusicDJ, and site founder and owner DJPretzel. My lawyer advised me not to further speculate about DJPretzel, so I will focus on the other Nobuo-groupies.

Children, or CotMM, having 10 Nobuo-track remixes accepted onto OCR, is presumably the worst of the fanatics. Apparently, he expresses his interest in the composer in a remix titled Eyes on Me (Obsession), which seems like a fitting name. The first step is admitting it.

FFMusicDJ also seems aware of his condition. Both he (or she or it) and Cot collaborated on the examples I’ve mentioned. While it’s possible to fight off addictions alone, it helps to be accountable to someone, which Cot and FFMDJ both seem to have arranged.

This leaves us with the enignatic lowercase zealot, mp, who appears aware of his addiction but deals with it differently. Apparently, Violent Rage attempted to rehabilitate mp, as they collaborated in producing a remix that I assume was made to vent the frustration over the unreciprocated feelings for the composer. It seems that this was unsuccessful, as mp produced two more remixes of Nobuo-tracks before…

Still, the very night I was writing this, I noticed the craze is not over. A Nobuo-track remix produced by OCR homie Zircon made its way to the site’s vast database of remixes. The track in question is the winner of a Nobuo-competition. Is this a passing trend, a fad that will fade? I think not. While the relatively recent release of a Final Fantasy fan arrangement album might delay further arrangement projects that grand, there’s no doubt more will follow.

Who is to blame?