Twenty years ago, I released His Skin Disguise and shortly thereafter I offered a pack of source audio bits for others to remix. A bunch of artists from the Tapegerm and Songfight! communities joined in and created some very cool music and enough excitement was had to encourage me to launch another website project called Remixfight.
I’m offering the original sample pack below, royalty free. Feel free to make something and send it my way so I can share with everyone.
My Blogger History
At the time, I was blogging on blogger and there are a few posts that mention the remix project and which provide a small amount of insight into the real time progress and evolution of it.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
His Skin Disguise
I started writing this one on Tuesday. I built it around the guitar rhythm. But Tuesday night saw only the guitar and drums going down. It sat around ’til today when I put down the rest of the tracks and wrote the lyrics.
I also cut my own hair this weekend. The bald spot knows no bounds.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Remix!
As promised, I’ve got the first remix package online and ready for your participation. Go remix my newest track, “His Skin Disguise,” with 20MB of free loops (30 loops in all), including drums, vocals, piano, guitar, and bass loops for your creative mixing pleasure. Your tracks will be included on an upcoming Blind Mime Confessions CD, in addition to being available right here — so get going!
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
more remix projects
Besides my Skin Disguise remix project, there are a couple others you might delve into. CRT has one running from his site. It’s a remix of his “Curse Of the Mommy” track. Heuristics Inc has a project as well called “Anemone.” This one’s drawing to close on May 31st, so you’ve just got a few days on that, but that just means if you finish something you might be on a CD real quick.
Monday, December 15, 2003
Heuristics Inc. Remix
Heuristics Inc. has just completed a cool remix of the Blind Mime track “Skin Disguise.” It’s awesome, especially how the vocal was twisted a bit to fit the piano differently. Click HERE to get it. You’ll find it under the REMIXES heading on the left.
I’ve also updated the “Skin Disguise” page with remixes by Extra Credit and my own remix, in addition to the “Kite On a String” page with a cover by MJB.
Monday, December 22, 2003
Mucho Activity
There are new tracks for the upcoming Skin, Disguised CD by Mental Anguish and UnDesirable. The album will be released January 19th.
I wrote a new song yesterday with a SongFight title after the deadline for some reason, but I really like how it’s turning out so it should be appearing here shortly; I’d like to record it tonight, but we’ll see. This morning, while further arranging “Tomorrow” I came up with another track which sounds like it has tons of energy. Feels like I’m on a roll which should translate into a bunch of material for collaborations as well.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Skin, Disguised release date
A dozen or so artists have contributed to the Skin, Disguised album, armed with a trunk full ‘o loops extracted from the Blind Mime track, “His Skin Disguise,” and the creativity to tear the song apart and realise new form from its pieces. It’s a very cool album with a variety of covers from which to choose. Collect them all, as they say! You can get it on Monday. Check out the web sites for the artists invovled and check out their music. Go HERE.
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
RemixFight!
The Skin, Disguised remix project went so well that RemixFight.com has now started. Should be fun!
The Songs With Artist Notes
| original track: His Skin Disguise |
| remixed by |
| the Blind Mime w/the Tapegerm Collective — My remix features the bass guitar of fellow Tapegerm artist Jair-Rohm Parker Wells with strings by Jonas Stoltz. This is an ACID mix with some reverb and phase on the drums. Been trying to get someone to rap on this one before finalizing it for Tapegerm. You know you don’t want ME to rap. |
| Extra Credit — As far as I can remember, I took the tracks from ‘Skin Disguise’ when they were first offered to me on the site; and rearranged them as some other song. But then I realized I couldn’t write words for it, so I took a real bad poem I wrote a real long time ago and basically read it through this little box I call my “portable noise mic” (because I don’t know what to actually call it) and stuck it on top. Yep. |
| Heuristics Inc. — While playing around with the loops at first I put some of them into AudioMulch and improvised a strange sequence of sounds. I used this as the introduction section, then created the rest of the track using Acid. My idea for the track was that out of the soup of sounds a real song should emerge over time as more recognizable elements came to the foreground. All sounds in this remix came from the original set of Blind Mime loops. The most challenging part here was making minute edits to the vocal lines to make them fit my modified rhythms. |
| Mental Anguish — I downloaded the loops quite some time ago, had a mix started using just the instruments. The machine crashed & I lost it all. I downloaded again, started the same sort of mix, did not care for the direction it was going anymore. So I decided to just use the vox, wrote a Electronic piece using Tapegerm monthly quota loops & some others I created, & dropped in the vox, tweaked & tweaked & tweaked to make them fit. I liked part of Bryan’s voice being pitched up a couple of notches for that sort of nasal post punk type twang. Had two mixes but prefered the submitted mix to the other one & that’s that. |
| UnDesirable — First I tried to figure out the bpm of the loops. I got something around 115bpm that worked for me. I then wrote out the lyric loops to see what I could work with. After that I started to create new loops from the original loops by mutilating them in the 1st version of the freeware program TUAREG. I accidentally sent a two measure loop into Tuareg and it converted it into one measure by speeding it up to 230bpm and raising it an octave. This ended up being the metal sounding riff at the begining after going through some effects.Then I did a bunch of other stuff, but I only get one paragraph. |
| Prank Monkey (feat. Johnny Cashpoint) — Every sound on this mix is taken from the original loops bar Johnny Cashpoint’s teutonic robotic toasting, which was meant as an affectionate pisstake of German techno band Scooter. “Hender Hoch” means “Hands Up”, or so we’re led to believe. As much as possible we tried to avoid listening to the original – and we think it shows. |
| Matthew Lee aka Sausage Boy — I listened to both the song and the samples repeatedly for a couple of days. I believe in finding the innate truth behind the music, and bringing that forward. I listened to the feeling and rhythm, letting the tempo become ingrained on my soul. And then I sped it all up twice as fast and sang about dicks. |
| Omnitechnomatrix — I enjoyed the loopz. I like the vocal trackz and the bazz linez alot. I used one of the bazz linez and changed it into a synth bazz line. Besides the vocal samplez – the rest of the music a wrote myself. I hope you all dig it. |
| Dr. Kong Balong — I went to sleep with the Reaktor manual under my pillow and this was in its place when I awoke. I like hypnotic word fragments, and I love gratuitous effects — kudos to the dub fairy! |
| Jack Shite — i wanted to stay true to certain parts of the original but still put my own stamp on it. i only pulled the samples i needed for both verses. i put a big, fat fuzz effect on the bass track. i pulled a bunch of vocal samples into the beginning to sort of represent the chaotic nature of our personality. on the verses, i added the dirty and acostic guitars and vox. the piano and drums are bryan clean. the middle section is the same vox loop pitch shifted and panned different each time. i was trying to present it as layers of skin being peeled away to get to the next section, with the glockenspiel over bryan’s piano loop, which was like the true inner self. and i kept thinking about michael jackson throughout the whole process. |
| Fantastic Vamps |
| Polish Rhino — Remixing this song took me back to the early days of Polish Rhino, when it was a solo project and I would just download random wavs and try to contruct some kind of song out of them. The prospect of actually remixing a real song was quite exiting, and revived the feeling I had when I would finish one of those early songs and realise I actually created something new, even if it sounded terrible. After listening to the song, and seeing the loops I knew I had to do it.” |
| Eddie Bangs — I only used the samples provided. |
| Fluffy Porcupine — Rather than listen to the song and have my ears sullied by preconceptions of how the sounds should fit together, I instead decided to take the most general-purpose loops from the set and use them as part of a totally-unrelated song. I feel vaguely confident that this song, created entirely out of other peoples’ loops (in the spirit of the competition) is the only one like it in this collection. |
Comments
One response to “Skin, Disguised Remix Project”
Thanks for the walk down memory lane!