making remixes is rad, plain and simple. messing with sounds in ableton, getting to play with various synths, and re-imagining tracks in to something new is low-stress fun. i think of remixes as akin to how bands in the 60s covered each other, just updated for a digital age.
back in february xiu xiu released a bunch of ringtones for free online – in reality these were various loops from dear god, i hate myself and when i heard them my first thought was that it would be cool to piece them back together in to a coherent track. this required a lot of time pitch shifting so they were all in the same key, beat matching so they were in the same tempo, and various manipulation of the sounds – the only samples that aren’t from the original set are the drums, which we made dilla-esque. a very fun process:
local natives have been buds of ours for varying lengths of time – max has known them for a while as they used to gig around la together when they were all younger. the rest of us met them around a year and a half ago when we all went in on a rehersal space together. needless to say they don’t use that space anymore (on the road 24/7) but we stay in touch and hang when we are all in the same city. great band and we were super excited when they released stems for their album gorilla manor – lots of real synth on this which was fun to mess with:
