Work In Progress: A Lunar Remix Saga

I’ve been working on a remix for my good friend @Synoiz. It’s taken a year - of course, had it really taken a year, I would have lost my job, and then my flat, and any semblance of self-respect I had for myself as a working musician. Really, I’d say it’s probably taken about a few weeks (a month at most) of proper time, but I’ve had to space it out so much because I’ve been so damn busy this year, that the whole affair got itself back-burnered quite a bit. So sit still and be quiet, while I relate my excuses for such a long project.

First off, I didn’t “like” From You the way I “liked” Andromeda. Andromeda’s pretty melodic and From You - er - isn’t. But I liked it well enough to chop, and that really wasn’t the problem. The track is fairly genreless, and I couldn’t pin a set style to the remix either, so the track sound is quite different to anything I’ve produced before - and it also had a lot of hissy vocal samples to treat. On top of all this, I must admit it’s been plagued with very odd technical problems.

I came up with the initial idea for the remix direction about last Easter - and had a working copy of the track by Easter Monday. After that, I left it for a few weeks (!) as the project wasn’t pressing. Later, I threw a few vox tracks at it that cemented the lunar theme, and the track gradually built into a proper structure. The whole thing was nearly done well in time for the summer, so I got pal Vinny to come help me mix it. This was about four or five mixing drafts in - I’m an obsessive incremental saver - and I’d exported from MacBook Ableton into Windows Acid Pro to mix and finalize the arrangement. We were trying desperately to give the main drums punch and felt nearly done - as best we could - when we noticed the file peaks seemed compressed. Sure enough, somewhere along the way, something had glitched somewhere and normalised, or booshed the sound on all the files that I was working on.

Phantom leveler? Auto-normaliser? Gremlin? Whatever it was, it thoroughly deflated us both so we ate pizza and sobbed gently to ourselves. I resolved to copy the final structure back onto my MacBook/Live setup and start fresh with all the sounds and work from one source - clean slate methodology.

I must admit, by this point I was pretty pissing sick of the track, and of Acid Pro, and of Windows, and of Neil fucking Armstrong.

The thing’s been nearly-but-not-quite-ing it since October - I just really needed the last moon sample to make a narrative point, and I finally found a complete recording of the moon landing audio logs.

But I digress. This is - truly - nearly - the last you’ll hear of this remix as a Work In Progress. The sad thing is, I don’t feel it’s very representative of my style, or of the original track. But I’ve learnt more this year, working with this track and others, than I’ve learnt in the last five years as an amateur producer of music. It’s my Apocalypse Now. Or my heart of darkness.

And I am now uncomfortably full of Moon Knowledge.