After about ten years of making original music for myself and my bands I have recently started to be involved with doing more and more remixes. This can be time consuming and hard work but I have found that I really enjoy it. When your ideas click with the original pieces and it all starts to flow into something familiar yet new and the nerves that come with waiting for the original artist to hear the piece and say they like it, assuming you respect them in the first place.
Going back the ten years to when me and a few friends started making electronic music, mostly horrible crap that made no sense, we did at times do remixes of each others work. But my first proper remix, which at the time was me messing about with a friends track in my bedroom, turned out to probably be my most heard piece of music to date. It wasn’t really until a few years later that I realised how big it was, and although at the time of doing the remix I had changed my name to hai! Robotto it was still released under my original name Tajfel Nipple. Recently it has had another release when the first two Sabrepulse albums were added to various download sites, the track can be heard on Spotify HERE.
When I started working on my remix of Famicom Connection I would have been influenced a lot by having started forming proper bands and writing songs with more traditional structures rather than instrumental pieces. So the remix was laid our in a more verse/chorus way and stripped back to its melody’s, changed bass lines and added new drums. The voice at the start of the track is mine put through a vocoder, and all I remember of the name Mr. Licky is that it was a joke between us, except I don’t remember what it was. Another thing about the track was that the released version was not actually my final piece. I distinctly remember changing some of it and even adding more, sadly I no longer have the remixed version, although I do have the original file that was sent to me.
Technically not a remix this track was one that I am proud of even with its terrible production. Around 2004 a lot of mash-ups were coming out, two songs getting mixed in to one, check out As Heard On Radio Soulwax. This was something I really wanted to do but didn’t have any idea how to. My solution to this was to download A cappella tracks and put them to my own music. I did work on a Pink song and an Usher song, but Christina Aguilera was the only one that resulted in anything worthwhile or whatever it is meant to be.
With the help of Escape Hawaii, I had an EP, Attack, Clap and Roll, added to the Russian website childrenofdos. This brought me a small amount of fame, mostly in Russia and Sweden and still get people finding it today. Because of this I was contacted by DJ Scratchin’ to do a remix. I accepted this without knowing anything about it and was sent few small samples that didn’t fit together. Instead of admitting defeat and pulling out from the remix I decided to just write a new song and jam the pieces in with vocoders and slicing, and ended up with something that was similar to my Tajfel Nipple work. Just a pile or noises.
Soundcloud held a remix competition for a Röyksopp track a few years back, although being a fan I wasn’t that interested until I found out that the singer was Karin Dreijer Andersson from The Knife of which I am a massive fan. Sadly, like a lot of these competitions, the judges would only really look at the tracks with the most views rather listen to them all, which is understandable, so with only a small fanbase my piece didn’t really get heard that much.
With last.fm a Foals remix competition was started, again like the Röyksopp one it was all to do with the amount of listens the track got before the judges even listened. With this remix I remember just chopping up all the individual notes and drums and making a new song with them. I didn’t add any extra synths or sounds to the final piece.
The Veela remix, run by FL Studio, was a lot more fun than the other remix competition. Every entry was listened to by followers, other entrants and Veela herself, who did in fact tweet and add the track to her Facebook page. It never made it into the finals but listening to the production quality of the other tracks it isn’t a surprise. With this one I decided to pull out all the original sounds, except vocals, and wrote my own piece under it in the style of The Romantic Cats.
Although I am not a massive fan of 8bc and the way the website works it has helped build up a few fans and friends, including Parallelis, who actually remixed one of my songs. I don’t think much of my version it has actually become one of my more popular recent tracks. This is one of a few remixes of my music and the only one done within that last few years. I am planning on a version that puts it back to its original guitar style.
Another band I met through 8bc was Palette Town, who are not a chip band at all but did take a keen interest in my music, and got my song Cineplex played on a radio station in Miami. To repay them, and also because I just wanted to, I remixed one of their pieces, which turned out to be one of the more fun remixes I had done.
Whilst working on it I didn’t really have an aim for a final sound. I started treating it like one of my own pieces, except with good singers, a guitar song with C64 sounds underneath. It was then added as an extra track on their EP.
More recently I have been working with the band the BDDM, recording and producing them. This meant I had all the original tracks to play with after I had finished the EP. My plan is to remix all the tracks eventually, some I know exactly what I want to do.
Early today I finished of my first remix Brain Shark.
With Love & Science 