#technikore

Hey look - Cryptrik's back!! It wasn't all that long ago that they were featured on here with the delightfully danceable A Mambo Moment after all, but it's been a while since I've featured a rip that truly showcases the thing that really sets the guy apart. Indeed, it was mostly a topic brought up in his very first post on here, Halation Generation: moreso than just a fantastic ripper, Cryptrik also has plenty of experience as a DJ, and has leveraged that experience to great effect throughout their time on the channel. While most everyone else was doing melodyswaps and mashups in the channel's first Seasons, Cryptrik was out here feeding us with Feeder Castle 1 - a full-on techno rearrangement of an iconic, yet arguably restrained, Mario Kart theme.

I'm sure many of you can relate if you've grown up nostalgically attached to any Mario Kart (I've certainly not been shy of it in posts like Neon Wi-Fi and Initial Deluxe (I've Just Raced on this Course Before)) - the series' music just has a way of getting absolutely stuck in your ears. Yet a lot of the music from Super Circuit to me has long felt...unrealized - something about that game's particular instrumentation, held back by the restrictions of the GBA, made its tracks unable to flourish as much as their melodies suggest - thus, its Bowser Castle theme has been ingrained into my head from years of playing Mario Kart Wii, yet never been able to truly register as a great song. That was, of course, until I heard Feeder Castle 1 - leveraging a song that I'm convinced almost nobody in the target audience had properly heard of before in order to finally make this theme click into place.

It is of course a completely different vibe from the original GBA Bowser Castle theme, heavy techno likely wasn't what any of the original composers had in mind for giving Bowser Castle its finalized sound. Yet the different sections of Feeder, a techno song made through the combined efforts of Technikore, JTS, Al Storm and Weaver, lend themselves amazingly to the track - because where they differ in instrumentation, they make up for in having a pretty similar tone in sound. Bowser's Castle is meant to sound heavy and imposing to reflect the character itself, and though conveyed in an unorthodox way, that is ABSOLUTELY what Feeder Castle 1 manages to do, althewhile making the track's earworm melody sing all the louder through the bolder instrumentation.

The rip feels like the kind of thing that ONLY Cryptrik could make, leveraging a song that's seemingly on the more obscure end in the scene he's most familiar in the music world to use for such a specific purpose as an old GBA Mario Kart track. The passion behind the rip feels similar to You Give Me Color Power in that sense - yet the degree to which Feeder is modified to borderline just feel like an original rearrangement of the source track, PARTICULARLY in the opening few seconds, gives the rip such a specific character unique to Cryptrik.