Thursday, November 24, 2016

New Remix: Only Objects – Black Lipstick

Well-known as the founder of the FutureSounds and SideChain brands that are all about promoting electronic music from Adelaide, my good mate Patrick Lang is also the lead singer and keyboardist of synthwave band [Only Objects].

Having organized some of my first gigs as a performer, I really felt I owed a lot to Patrick and was honoured to be asked to contribute a remix of their ‘Black Lipstick & Broken Hearts’ single to be released Saturday December 3 at the world-famous FutureSounds VI - maybe just Adelaide-famous but anyway it's huge! It is completely free with entry to FutureSounds which itself is just $5 bucks.

After receiving the stems I realized, this was going to be a good challenge for me in that not only was I working with vocals from a whole song (as opposed to instrumental tracks), but the bassline was complicated, song structure and arrangement quite unorthodox and tempo hovering around 75bpm.

Straight away I realized I needed to simplify things for the dancefloor and so couldn’t keep all the vocals, splitting them up into more manageable sections. I also played around with some beats for the slow tempo which started working quite well but was lacking any punch until I realized that 75bpm can also be 150bpm – i.e. drum and bass territory.

I haven’t really done too many dnb tracks to date although you can hear some dnb structure in my track Ethereal as part of the free-to-download Blueprints EP, although I have got to say  I think I may have pulled off something better than I expected with this remix.

The remix has crisp beats, danceable bassiness, twice-vocoded vocals, and one really nice drop. I hope you enjoy it!