photo from OLEJNICZAKmatthew_swin.
A change in pace. You aren't screwed if you don't know anything. You're screwed if you don't know anything and you've lost the passion to learn.
I've finished my very first remix ever. Dance music website Beatport are known for running remix competitions and when I saw that they had released the stems for a song off Underworld's recent effort Barking, called 'Bird 1', it was the kick in the arse I needed to fire up Ableton, force myself to learn it's ins and outs, and get something made. Not that I particularly care about the fact that it's a competition (like any person out there, though: I wouldn't say no to thousands of dollars of new production equipment!) - to be honest, the opportunity to remix an artist like Underworld I'm so in love with and inspired by was something I'd hate myself for passing up. Here is the result:
Inspired by many of the emerging post-garage and dubstep artists I've found myself listening to lately (Scuba, Distance, Vaccine, Burial - and more), I wanted to take the original track and remove many of the elements that annoyed me about the original (that fucking four-to-the-floor beat, ugh!), stripping it back to a clean, minimalistic piece where the focus was on the syncopated rhythms of each section interacting and shifting with each other. The vocals were, for some reason, a struggle for me to work with - which was the perfect excuse to rip most of them out and keep the focus remain on the slowly-evolving and shifting beats.
I also took the liberty of referencing Underworld's earlier work not only in terms of structure and sound, but there's a brief snippet of me speaking that happens to be borrowed from a Second Toughest in the Infants track - I'll be pleased if somebody gets it!
Despite the obvious flaws (the kick-drums have a strange echo to them, the flange applied to the hats doesn't sound right in places - and the pacing could be better, among other things), I'm terribly pleased with the mere fact that I've finally finished something, learnt a thing or two about a very powerful piece of sequencing and recording software, and know now I've got the potential to learn and achieve some really cool things - despite only owning a MacBook and the intro version of Ableton.
Watch this space.
