Gawls Remix-diary...

October 2001: I entered the studio where McBroszat was finishing the end mix of his new track "Halt!" He askde me to include it in future demo CDs that I was going to distribute, and he told me that he'd be interested to create a new (a third) Christmas track, in addition to the two ones that he and Repgen had recorded in 1998. I think it was quite a surprise for him when I told him that I had different plans for his next future: Wumpscut had started a "remix contest" for the title track of the recently issued album "Wreath of Barbs". They offered a bunch of sounds and snippets (in MPEG-3 format, bundled together in a big archive file) for download. The rules were simple: Anything would be allowed, the resulting musical tracks should be sent to Betonkopf Media until end of December. I thought that this would be a great interesting thing for McBroszat, with --hopefully-- a big promotional side-effect.

21 October 2001: The first problems arose soon afterwards: My versions of both Netscape and the Internet Explorer crushed whilst browsing the Wumpscut website. All the embedded RealPlayer and JavaScript stuff seemed to have a hazardous effect. So I needed to fetch the HTML pages one by one with a basic, simple "httpget" terminal tool and search them for the download URL. Although downloading the archive file was straightforward then, it turned out that it was in some strange, exotic file format, which demanded the installation of a new, special archive application. And after all, it turned out that McBroszat's first reaction was far from being enthusiastic. "What did you decide in my name?! What do you think I am? A techno-crap-home-constructor?!"

November 2001: Fortunately, McBroszat is getting more and more enthusiastic about the project. Whenever I meet him, he keeps telling me how absurd and bizarre the whole thing is, with all those sound snippets, but no synchronisation signal, no information about the key or even the tempo that has been used in the original. He seems to spend ages in just listening to melody fragments and trying to re-play them with a piano, in order to detect the key. Some drum-loops (being also contained in the remix-sources) are re-sampled carefully, then analysed for loop durations, in order to find out the Beats per Minute.

20 November 2001: McBroszat is getting deeper into the project. Today he even bought the "Wreath of Barbs" album-CD and listened to the original track...

26 November 2001: While I am already working on some artwork for the CD to be sent to the Betonkopf guys, McBroszat suddenly shocks me by telling me that he is absolutely not satisfied with what he has been recording up to now. He is still feeling that he has not succeeding in re-producing the "soul" of the original piece of music. I am surprised: I have never had the impression that he (McBroszat!) would take care of "soul"...! He announced that he would re-start everything from scratch, leaving me behind in a quite pessimistic mood...

6 December 2001: Just when I was beginning to lose hope McBroszat comes in and tells me that he has finished working on a first remix. Now he would like to make some copies to give them away to his usual test-listeners. If it would turn out that they like the track then he would agree to send it to Betonkopf.

12 December 2001: Now things are getting really fast. Not only have his "test-listeners" nodded to "Des Dissonanten Remix" (which was a surprise because this is not the kind of music that McBroszat usually comes up with), he even used the past week-end to create a completely new, a second remix. Oh yes, that track "Let's Do the WOB" is a cyber-fun-punk-Kamikaze-thing rather than a serious approach to a remix (and indeed: He told me that his main intention had been to abreact, to "let off steam" after all the weeks spending for that remix contest), but after all, from the point of view of "industrial music", I think I like that second one even better than the first, the "real" remix.

9 January 2002: Between Christmas and now McBroszat was on holiday in Sweden, "enjoying the frostiness of the Scandinavian winter, in order to collect new ideas and new inspiration", as he told me. I haven't heard anything at all from "Betonkopf", and so it is obvious that McBroszat's contribution was not elected. (To be honest, we had not expected this anyway...) Then, soon after he returned we get an e-mail from synotec-newmedia (who seem to maintain the Wumpscut web pages). All contributors are invited to store their remix on some web page and can be linked from the Wumpscut web site. When listening to several other remixes I get the impression that McBroszat's was not completely wrong with his first reaction: All the music sounds very very very technoid, there is nothing like the harsh, industrial-like stuff that McBroszat had sent. So, again, McBroszat seems to be quite exceptional with what he is doing...

(Gawl, 23 January 2002)

Iciness in Sweden
McBroszat in Sweden