Glass Candy "I Always Say Yes (Baron von Luxxury Remix Parts II & III)"
This is the first official remix of a Glass Candy song, "I Always Say Yes (Baron von Luxxury Remix)." This is actually Parts II and III of what turned into a 19 minute remix of the song, in five different parts. Here's how it happened. Since last April I've been working on the remix and meeting up with Johnny Jewel after Glass Candy and Chromatics shows in San Francisco, Brooklyn and LA. We'd discuss the latest mix, and then a few days later I’d get text messages and emails with suggestions. "Ida likes her vocals in this part." "Try using more repetition." Then we'd both get busy with other things (I was remixing Scissors for Lefty, CSS, Sunny Day Sets Fire, Robots in Disguise AND Ms. Hilary Duff, as well as signing a publishing deal; he's running Italians Do It Better and writing/producing/touring with all the amazing bands on that label) and time would pass.
Until somehow nine months went by, and the remix became 19 minutes long! Finally, late this past November I met Mr. Jewel in the parking lot of a Best Western in LA after Glass Candy's show at the Troubadour. I gave him a CDR, we talked, and the next week I got a txt from him saying: "congratulations, the saga is over!" And so it is; and here are Parts II and III of the remix. (The rest is coming soon.)
A FEW MUSICAL THOUGHTS THAT WENT INTO THIS REMIX, I.E. WHY IT TOOK ME 9 MONTHS TO MAKE: The original song "I Always Say Yes" is an icy disco masterpiece. I didn't want to give it a "typical" remix treatment i.e. bump up the BPM, add slammin' kick, distorted bass, compress like hell. I just felt that Glass Candy is the antithesis of the bloghouse banger aesthetic, and the track deserved something different. I focused on the fact that the original song has an unusual structure: there's no chorus. There are plenty of hooks, to be sure, but no real refrain.
So I decided to make something of a *reverse* remix. I chopped up Ida No's original vocal into dozens of individual phonemes, and rearranged each one to create an entirely new melody for the verse. Then I added all new music underneath - an entirely new song, really - to showcase the sound and retain the mystery and enigma of her incredible voice in a new context. Finally, I found a line from the original vocal, added a second vocal track and pitched it up to create a harmony, and thus was born the chorus. All the original vocal parts are retained, but completely re-ordered.
The result is a blend of Schoenberg's serialism meets the Cocteau Twins via Crystal Castles. At the end of the day I think I did the original justice, without doing it Justice. Part III (also included in this Mp3) extends the same re-modelling idea to the original music, with the addition of silence as a new element. By contrast with part II, there is no vocal in this section, and I only added light percussion in parts. The absence of sound as a compositional element was inspired by Miles Davis' famous line about the importance of "knowing when *not* to play." Anyway, that's my pretentious explication. Thanks for listening, hope you like the music. Sincerely, Baron von Luxxury is my Fake Name
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