This is kind of a tail-end to my original post about my 3AM remix of Gotye’s Hearts a Mess. I just found a couple of early demos of the track by accident and decided there were elements buried amongst them that I kind of liked, so I’m posting them here so they don’t get completely lost. I guess I’m kind of taking a page from Tim’s book here.

Warning: these are rough. Basically, when I’m demoing ideas for a remix I perform the whole thing live to my hard disk with a keyboard and mouse in realtime (I used Audiomulch, if you’re wondering). There are plenty of mistakes to be heard.

First I start playing around with ideas for chords and textures for a remix. All of the drum sounds are hastily sourced from my stock repository of samples I use to get things going. I apparently hadn’t quite worked out what vibe I wanted at this point.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The next day I think Carly and I were moving house. Somehow during the course of this I found time to mutate the mix into this. Don’t be deceived by the fact that the first minute sounds fairly similar to the way it is now: it’s pretty different.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

From this point onwards it fairly rapidly became what it is now, but they’re the two early working demos that I turned out.

Again, thanks to everyone who gave feedback while I was playing around with these.

Given I just made the terrifying discovery that it got airplay on Triple J a couple of days ago, I suppose it’s safe to assume that the cat is out of the bag and that I’m OK to blog about it.

Admittedly, secrecy was poorly maintained to say the least, but nonetheless I’m now officially pleased to announce the existence of my 3AM Remix of Gotye’s excellent song, Heart’s A Mess. Here’s the 20 second snippet I posted a while back:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The remix was an entirely unexpected project, both for myself and Gotye (aka Wally de Backer), but one thing has lead to another and it now seems that it will appear on the next Gotye LP, a remixes and covers compilation scheduled for release in July entitled Mixed Blood. You can read many different announcements about this.

In conjunction with making my own announcement of the remix, I would like to say thankyou to Wally, who offered phenomenally helpful advice and generous amounts of his time to see it through to completion, and to my brother Michael who inspired the project in the first place. Also many thanks are also due to Janet, Colin, Jatin, Yimmy, (the long suffering) Camilla and far above all, the ever-awesome Carly. Thanks also to Michael Morrow for helping out with some details in the mix engineering.

Briefly about the track for those interested: most of the sounds were created and programmed in Audiomulch, following which I transferred everything across to Pro Tools for additional production and mixing. Wally played some brushes on it early one morning while we were playing with the song, and Michael added some polish.

If you’ve just surfed in after hearing it, I’d love to hear what you think of the track. Feel free to drop me an e-mail (link on the right hand side) or leave a comment.

And don’t forget to buy a copy of Mixed Blood when it hits stores! I for one can’t wait to get mine. To sate your appetite for the time being, go listen to the very cool ENS remix of Puzzle With A Piece Missing on the Gotye myspace.

Update: the Mixed Blood track list has been posted.

OK, here’s today’s track. Featuring some Aphex-y skittering beats and a driving bassline. Again, done in Audiomulch, it samples Bloc Party (Positive Tension) and Hendrix (Freedom, Voodoo Child).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s a *very* rough mix, and a bit rambly, with a few mistakes. See what you think – comments always welcome.

I’ve been enjoying playing a bit with Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch – it’s an implementation of a few different algorithms for time-stretching audio to insane levels – we’re talking slowing audio files down from a few minutes to to potentially hours.

In particular, it’s served well as a tool to provide interesting source material for new textures and sounds. I’ve been primarily grabbing ambient parts that would form a big-sounding aural bed underneath whatever I was doing, but now I’ve just recently discovered that some great effects can be got by chopping up the audio at random. Like this one here (the source sample was the synth line talked about in my previous post).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This sound was created – again in Audiomulch – by triggering short, segmented sound bites that I’d captured out of the stretched audio via a drum sequencer.

Right, back to work…

Here’s a lame excuse to test out a very cool audio plugin for Wordpress; I’m contemplating the idea of using it to occasionally post snippets of little aural experiments I’ve done to get feedback on. Most of them aren’t very good, so don’t get too excited.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

About this one: we recorded a demo of a possible new song last Monday, during which I jumped on the keys and emitted a lot of ambient dreck. At the end, however, after the song had finished I stumbled upon a 4 bar moment that I kind of liked but never actually performed properly.

At 1am this morning Yimmy sent me an mp3 of the demo which inspired me to try and make something of that little 4 bars. I hacked it up mercilessly in CoolEdit and then dropped it into Audiomulch. What you hear is the hurried creation of various elements over the space of 30-45 minutes before wearily hitting the hay. The mix was quickly done just now to capture a snapshot of it in its early stages before I started playing around with it too much more.

I’m not sure what I think. I still like the sample but as for the direction this headed, probably not quite what I’m after.

Anyway, any comments? Like or hate?