This One A Remix…
Way back in the mid 90’s Tony Justice released the seminal intelligent drum & bass track “Aquisse”. Fast forward to 2010 and Detroit drum & bass producer Sinistarr has given it the remix treatment. We get both sides of the story…
We asked Justice to fill us in:
“The original Aquisse was made back in 1995 and in many respects seems an age away, but also sometimes like it was only yesterday. The feeling I get when I hear it now is pretty much the same as the day I recorded it, which I think is quite unusual for producers, for me anyway, because when a tunes done you don’t really want to hear much of it and you are onto the next project.
It was made over two evenings in a guys garage we called “the Studio” and on an Atari 1040 st running Cubase, just strictly doing the sequencing and some sort of keyboard sampler, an Ensoniq or Casio. All the samples were sourced from vinyl from my collection and we used some 808’s and 909 kits we already had sampled . Really in respects of technology it was an age away and I know we used to dream of things you can now do quite easily on your laptop. The tune came together in about 4 hours, I had sampled up a pile of vinyl and found the main pad sound that would become THE riff sound in Aquisse. We had some 808/909 beat running , I wanted to bring that techno/electro element, no-one else was really doing that. I played around with playing in the pad and the element of Aquisse was right there. I suppose my formula was quite organic, we had loads of samples, some worked , some didn’t so we disgarded them. Some of the samples were worked into a call and response sequence to fit around the riff, a kind of walking bass went in and it was all rolling. It was a tune that didn’t really exist in the genre at the time. I taped it onto a cassette when we were done about 3-4 hours later, and just muted tracks in and out on Cubase. When I drove home and listened to it , the mute in and out mix, it sounded right, drops in and out in the right places and so on. So the next session we played the cassette and pretty much arranged the track as we heard it coming back of the tape. It then went onto the DAT tape and the rest is history.”
Whenever a producer takes on another artists work, there is always going to be questions raised regarding interpretation, reinvention and paying homage to the original piece while still leaving your own signature stamped on the track. We can all think of remixes that meet the above criteria, but for every great remix, there is a long list of remixes that don’t really hit the mark. For the remixer, there’s a lot of pressure and a high expectation!
From here we pick up with Sinistarr:
“Tony, Justice, mentioned to me that he was doing some remixes for his track Aquisse. He said that a few guys were going to do one, that this new guy Muted had just done the first one and did I want to get onboard. I said of course, and asked Tony to send it over so I could check out the original. I listened to the tune for over a month before I got started on the remix, I really enjoy the remixing process and I wanted to get into the track, how it moves and pops, and all the elements within it, the sounds, synths and the beats. I do my research, break the track down and use that as my starting point. Then I listened to the original elements Tony had sent me, all the original samples. I know that a few of them had gone missing over the years, but saying that the synths and parts were really cool and there were no beats at all. That was good though because it made me think outside the box a little more. My whole take on doing a remix is to flip it, but to keep the same elements and warp them to make it really work. Basically I tried to make my take true to the era, back to the 90’s, by using some crazy “Think” breaks and stuff. Also I wanted to give the big man a shout out in there !!”
Justice…
“Someone had told me about the track Detroit Diesel, and that I should go listen to it. It was my first encounter with Sinistarr. I went to his Myspace and had a listen and the track blew me away. I left him a comment or a message and that’s how it started really. He was doing some great beats and the man was from Detroit, a town whose music I had always been influenced by and had an affinity to. He did a track on the Modernists LP and we just kept firing bits of music back and forth at each other. He has a great signature to his sound which is something I really like plus he has that D-town techno lick that interweaves his stuff. I asked him about Aquisse as I knew he would get the original and roll into something beaty, gritty, techy and just put his stamp on it. Jeremy is a good guy and real easy to work with and that’s something I appreciate theses days.
For the label, this is the second coming as such… I like to work with like minded individuals and the “unit” has always been important to me, I guess it’s the whole strength in numbers thing. It’s also about liking the music and all the guys who work in or around the label, I like their bits. I like to try and keep it close, but also when I come across guys like Muted, Diamond Eye or whoever, I think it is important to give them a platform, a leg up. Metro does all the design, website, a lot of promo as well as record and really this time around is a huge part of Mjazz. I suppose everything we do is very loose and its nice to let things take their own natural shape, and be very , no pun intended, organic.”
Forthcoming on MJazz……..we have a new Modernists 2 Cd is coming soon, another ltd hand finished item, Icons LP digital release, with some extras as it has never come out via the digi medium, some 839 remixes and whatever else comes about.
Aquisse (Sinistarr Remix)-JUSTICE. by JUSTICE
JUSTICE – AQUISSE (MUTED REMIX) (MJazz)-v2 by JUSTICE
Aquisse Metro’s simples mix by JUSTICE