Castlevania Series – Travel Demon (rem. S.S.H.)

What Halloween would be complete without some severe Castlevania rock music? Tonight to fill in that extra hour of Halloween (remember to set your clocks back one hour!), I’ve got the fantastic piece by SSH (Saitama Saisyu Heiki), a vgm mixer from Japan. Over there, fan works such as game music remixes are known as doujin. SSH is one of the top doujin artists who not only produces albums but also distributes his music on his site (sorry, Japanese only, but navigable via the ‘MP3′ button). There is certainly a distinct difference between Japanese and American composers and mixers, not the least of which being simply influences from different native musical styles. Anyway, here is perhaps his most famous work, “Travel Demon,” over seven minutes of Castlevania metal goodness.

Castlevania Series – Travel Demon (SSH)

This track is simply awesome, with an interesting combination of guitar and synth. This mega medley contains nearly a dozen classic Castlevania tunes, including what is perhaps my all-time favorite, Simon’s Theme, of which this is one of the better renditions. Some of these other tracks, such as Castlevania II’s “Dwelling of Doom” and Castlevania III‘s “Aquarius” get far too little coverage. There’s some nice breaks as well, with a particularly interesting one before “Wicked Child” that sounds a bit like Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” (hey, if Bobby Prince could get away with it, then so can SSH!). Here’s a list of all the tunes:

Bloody Tears (intro), Battle of the Holy (intro), Beginning, Bloody Tears, Simon’s Theme, Aquarius, Mad Forest, Monster Dance, Wicked Child, Dwelling of Doom, Simon’s Theme (reprise)

About the only track missing from this lineup is “Vampire Killer.” SSH has also composed a couple Bloody Tears remixes, but covers a wide range of music, including Final Fantasy. The guitars here are sequenced (he plays a Gibson Les Paul), and the synth instruments are played on keyboard. The guitars sound a little synthetic, mostly due to the sequencing, but also to the rather shabby 160kbps encoding (as far as I know, there’s no better version out there). Yup, that’s an actual Japanese guitar ninja shredding away. Rock on, dude!

Advertisement