Hmm, no great updating going on - the last entry was over a month ago. My apologies. Well then, what have I been up to? I didn't really cover much of that in the last post, so I guess there's something to talk about. I've polished up a couple of the new tunes aired at The New Science, preparing them for anthologising. As always, names are the last things I give my tunes, so I can't really tell you which ones. I think they both turned up on my live-to-air spot on The Session (for Active) the night before that gig as well, for anyone who caught that. At any rate, you can look forward to what I hope will be a tight compilation album from Angry Rabbit some time this year.
My own favourite compilations are always the ones that not only just try to get a good bunch o' tunes, but select and arrange so as to make a proper coherent set - such as Mo Wax's first Headz comp from 1994 and not the bloated slap on the back of two years later. Not that what we're working on is going to be cut from the same cloth as Headz, just trusting it won't be cut from the same cloth as Headz 2...
I've also done a spot of remixing lately. I don't have a lot of experience that way, so it was as much to get something under my belt as anything else - though the total lack of a commercial motive meant I could focus entirely on remixing works of aesthetic worth. Although the works I remixed were both by my good buddy Stuart (Aquaboogie), I still wound up working from the finished products rather than component tracks - so I guess what I did may have been more like writing mash-ups, or just plain old-fashioned sampling.
One of those remixes was just a good laugh among friends - converting one of Stuart's early works into a pastiche of late '80s/early '90s hardcore hip-hop - but the other was a "serious" attempt at remixing his rather fine 'Gravity Loops', from International Travel.
But those working methods constrained what I could do. 'Gravity Loops' has many long and gradually developing lines within it, and though I would have liked to work with some of these they were almost always embedded within yet more developing lines. Thus I ended up with a few key bar-length phrases and came out with a loop-oriented mix, one which I chose to exacerbate by attaching a standard-issue hippyhop break (given epic reverb, to compensate for the loss of the some of the sweep of the original).
I wasn't entirely convinced this was any good at all, certainly not compared to the original. I cobbled on a few cuts from a 7" of my old primary school's orchestra, and sent it off to Stuart for the sake of his curiosity rather than as finished product.
He was taken with it though, for some reason thinking it better than the original (the fool). He got me to finish it off "properly" (but keeping the school orchestra) and then played it out at a Malty Media night at Katipo. That isn't a bad outcome, I guess, though commercial viability is a long way off.
Posted by Andrew at February 19, 2008 3:19 PM