Artist Review: Adolfo Baez

Personally, I find it quite incredible when someone takes the time to perfect their craft and make something truly outlandish. It says to the world that you've got a skill and you're one of the relative few, who decided to act upon an impulse and create something unique for everyone.

Video game compositions are an incredible art within the world of music. It's taking one piece of established creation and merging it with another entirely different form of art. Pictures, turned moving animations, furnished into large scale landscapes with impressive, prophetic compositions that change an otherwise lifeless set of pixels...into a fully realized historical treasure.

I love video games, and I can see when someone appreciates my shared vision through video game music remixing...which, is another art form in itself. You have skilled talent that took the time to create the original, and then you have adept new age composers who praise that original talent by taking "source material" and transforming it into something completely new.

It takes a special person to realize what hell the original talent had to go through to make things as sound as good as they did back then.

However, this is where Adolfo Baez takes it to the next level...

By taking two steps back...

Despite all the new equipment composers/producers of the world have at their disposal today, Adolfo Baez, prefers the comforts of a simple, more stable digital audio workstation called "Mario Paint Composer". What year is that release, you might ask? 2007? 2011?

Wrong.

August 1, 1992. I was two years old...and while I didn't get to play the game until I was 4-5 years older, I knew that the game had one of the most kickass flyswatting mini-games known to mankind, at that time.

The idea behind making music within a video game that a composer probably programmed as a joke...just shows you how much time was (most definitely) spent on polishing what seems to be another...mini game. Adolfo's arrangements range from 2 mins long to an impressive 15-20 mins long. They are all jam-packed with plentiful, nostalgic etudes from an age of video games...future generations will look upon as relics.

It's hard to say that last sentence. It's hard to feel as though memories I have, are now limited to be relative to anyone who isn't in my current generation or...perhaps two generations younger.

But it explains why, when I came across Adolfo's music...I felt like a piece of that "relic" became more real again. Images started flaring up, and I could see myself playing with the largest video game coloring book again; ended up looking like this.

I don't know if this guy realizes what positive light was shed when I came across his craft, and I don't even know if he'll read this blog but I can say through his music, he's doing a service for everyone who happens to stop by his YouTube page and click "Play". Seeing the program he's using, hearing the timbre of each note...is an enlightening look into the past.

If you've ever cared about video games and the music that was designed for them, you owe it to yourself to check out this guy's music and be amazed by the "Inception-esque" way of remixing he does.