The Happy Soul

NYPC

MiSTOA POLTSA

Ex-Easter Island Head

Altar Flowers

Lana Del Rey

The Heartbreaks

The Lone Taxidermist

Bombay Bicycle Club

Holly Johnson

East India Youth

The Yossarians

Ten Mouth Electron

Erasure

Goldblade

ILL

Mountain Song

English Heretic

Locean

Charlotte OC

Saint Etienne

DENA

John Foxx

remix

Remixing Erasure’s ‘Elevation’

erasure_elevation

 

Another Club Clique remix, and some of the fastest work we’ve ever done. Completely done and dusted in two sessions of about six hours each (mixing aside).

Partly, this is because it came in the middle of a flurry of work, so we were leaner and meaner than Vasquez from ‘Aliens’ that week. But also partly because it’s such a great song (as you’d expect from Erasure) and Andy Bell’s vocal performance is killer.

The Richard X-produced original had a long-ish instrumental intro, so we decided to start with the vocal. Because hey, it’s Andy Bell singing, a sound which produces instant joy. We also thought no Erasure comeback would be complete without a big stomping piano house classic, in the mould of Frankie Knuckles’ remix of ‘The Pressure’ by Sounds of Blackness.

Can’t remember most of the details now, but I know the piano is 4Front’s TruePianos, there are a bunch of z3ta+2 synth sounds, and a bit of tomfoolery with a white noise generator and Tone2’s Bifilter 2 plugin. There are orchestral timpani samples in there from somewhere too. Because you can never go too far.

I can’t begin to describe how happy this makes me

Awesome YouTube clip using one of the first ever Club Clique remixes. Some fantastic finger choreography in there.

Can’t remember the exact date, but I think we made this remix about two and a half years ago.

Cat Power – Manhattan – Club Clique remix

Something the Clique DJs and I knocked up for DJing purposes last year. As Ms Marshall was in the UK recently, we thought we’d stick it up on the internet.

Can’t remember all the details of the production now, but it features me on live bass and e-bow guitar.

The basic idea was that the original is a sort of reflective, contemplating the city on the train to work in the morning song.  So we thought it would be good to get that song really drunk and take it out on a Saturday night.

Also remixed the video for good measure:

John Foxx – Underpass – Oh The Gilt remix – released at last

Well, after sitting on the shelf for seven months, this is finally out at the end of May. Still really pleased with this one.

Limited edition, all stamped and numbered.

underpassLimited

East India Youth – Heaven How Long – Oh The Gilt Remix

East India Youth’s brilliant Hostel EP was the first release on The Quietus’s record label, and myself and Quietus editor John Doran, in our guise as Oh The Gilt did this remix for it.

An absolute joy to work on, great song, and a fantastic vocal performance. Lots of foley on this too, with the rain and all the weird metallic sounds being created in my flat.

In my mix room, I’ve got a TV over to the left of where I sit, that I can just about see out of the corner of my eye. I had Blade Runner on with the sound down while I mixed this one. Only realised later how appropriate it was, what with the rain and the general moodiness.

http://boomkat.com/vinyl/664103-east-india-youth-hostel-ep

HMV commercial

Blimey, it’s the remix that refuses to die.

Almost a year after it was first out, here’s the Clique Remix of Lana Del Rey’s Video games backing an HMV TV spot.

There’s something almost profound about this lament to doomed romance being used as a backing to an effort to sell off surplus stock of the Playstation 3 Spider-Man game. My early 20s in a nutshell right there. Long story.

John Foxx – Underpass (Oh The Gilt remix)

Can’t put a stream to this up yet, as it’s not officially out til early 2013 (UPDATE, May 2013 – it’s finally out! More here). But it’s mad, scary, long and has been described by the man himself as “excellent”.

A very great honour to work on such a seminal synth pop track. Here’s the original in the meantime:

The Heartbreaks – Polly (Club Clique Remix)

Fairly dense and complex production this. Obeys the you’re-never-100%-satisfied rule in that I wish I could go back and tweak the mix. Opening riff sound could be much better, and it’s too bass-heavy overall. But the band liked it, and there’s a lot I’m really pleased with, especially the drum programming, which starts off fairly minimal and gets full-on Keith Moon at the end.

A treat to have such a great vocal to work with. The original track is a lot more rawk, but we thought there was a more Pulp-style weird pop song in there trying to get out, so we shamelessly camped it up.

Slightly unusual process, in that Ian wasn’t available for the first couple of sessions, so it was mainly myself and Damien working on it at first. And as is easy to do, we got perhaps overly attached to what we’d done and a bit protective over it when he arrived at the third session and suggested a long list of fairly radical changes. All of which he was right about, somewhat annoyingly.

Saint Etienne – Tonight (Club Clique Remix)

This was a nice one to do. Saint Etienne’s So Tough LP was a youthful obsession through the summer of 1993. I loved the way it was retro and modern at the same time.

Very synthetic-sounding, but if you listen carefully you can just about pick out an acoustic guitar on the verses giving it a bit of Balearic shimmer.

Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans (Club Clique remix)

This was a concious exercise in making something highly synthetic sounding. There’d been a lot of blather about whether Lana Del Rey was “authentic” or not, which we thought was just about the least interesting question imaginable, so this was a slightly oblique two fingers to all that.

On the technical front, this was the first time I’d dusted off Propellerheads’ Reason in a fair while, which is where the wobbly low synth noise came from. Also lots of fun was had cutting up and messing around with the vocals. Not to create a noticeably chopped effect, but rather to fake a different performance of the song.

There was also quite a lot of timing editing with the vocals. Not because it wasn’t a killer performance, because it was, but again, to add to the artificiality of the thing, in contrast to the impassioned looseness of the original.

Ended up as the lead remix on the European remix package, as seen above.

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