For many people, each time OCR announced a project, there is always a lot of excitement and buzz. OCR has for many years been a gathering point for most remix musicians in the videogame scene, and these projects always allow talent to come together to celebrate all these classic soundtracks. We recently interviewed the project leaders for the newest OCR project, Serious Monkey Business, and talked about the participation of well-known names and newcomers, and also about the hurdles involved with these projects. Donkey Kong Country 2 is a complex beast, but with talent such as David Wise, the original composer, on board as well as well-known names like Jake Kaufman, Prince of Darkness, Sixto, Joshua Morse, Zyko and many other talented remixers, there’s no reason to think they can’t succeed in doing a great album.
But projects often fall into the same potholes in that the project leaders and musicians lose track of what they’re actually doing, as we’ve seen many times projects such as Summoning of Spirits being 5 discs and seemingly having no general quality control or direction leaving the project to be a huge mess. Without direction and quality control these projects become a big pile of individual tracks that don’t work together and therefore, as an album as we saw in the Final Fantasy IV project, if you give people too much creative freedom, they’ll go off and make horrendously unfunny hip-hop that is only funny to the four people who came up with the idea. It will be interesting to see if the Serious Monkey Business ends up feeling the same way.
Find out after the jump! (more…)
