Electronic dance music artist Huoratron wants to reinvent the remix. To do so, he’s working on software that would generate a unique version of a given song every time the track gets downloaded.
“I think remixes are pretty dead as a concept,” Huoratron, aka Aku Raski, said in an interview with Wired. “They’re so utterly boring in a sense…. It’s just a cheap way to do a new song. I was thinking this whole thing could be used as a way to create way more interesting remixes, that it would be almost never-ending variations on the remix.”
LISTEN: ‘Bug Party (JDevil’s Catholic Nun remix)’ by Huoratron
Such a program couldn’t come at a better time. With electronic dance music (EDM to the cool kids) popping up everywhere thanks to artists like Skrillex, people can’t seem to get enough of hard-hitting rave-up tracks. With Raski’s program, fans could conceivably get as many permutations as they want. And if he releases the program for others to use, the potential for endless remixes becomes very real.
The Scandinavian producer — whose hard-core banger of a debut album, Cryptocracy, comes out April 24 on Last Gang Records — is still working on the remix program. But if Raski has his way, it will live on a website or Facebook page that will let people download variations of his songs. The downloaders would then be free to trade the tracks with other fans so they could try to figure out the differences.
Raski, a native of Finland who began making electro tracks in 2002 using two Game Boys, initially wanted to try a sneaky experiment with his algorithm-powered remix program. He wanted to offer a free download, then see if listeners noticed that their versions were different than what they heard on a friend’s mixtape or in a club. But his label, manager and other interested parties had other ideas.
“It needs to be fun for everybody,” Raski said. “Fun for the label for some income, fun for me artistically to do something valuable and, of course, for the people to get a kick out of exploring the whole thing.”
The program, which Raski hopes to have online in the fall, is being made largely with Max/MSP, with some Ableton Live thrown in. It will essentially let Raski determine specific parameters for which chunks of several new compositions can be altered, and how many variations can be made. Different parameters will then determine how the pieces can be glued together; the resulting .wav files will be given the same song name. Flash and PHP scripts on the server side will then determine which tracks go to which users.
Raski still hasn’t determined how the tracks will be priced, but says he’s weighing many options. He said he doesn’t mind at all if people want to swap or share their tracks. And even though his system has the potential to churn out thousands of potential remixes, the producer is also adamant that he will write rules to make sure his program doesn’t just turn out millions of totally random tracks.
“Endless variations is not a smart choice.”
“Endless variations is not a smart choice,” Raski said. “When I do this algorithmic generative stuff with Max/MSP to compose and I use a random generator, it most of the time sounds [like] shit.”
Something else that doesn’t sound like crap? Making music for Gary Numan. Raski recently finished composing a song he hopes will make it on the electronic music trailblazer’s next album. (He says he heard Numan liked it.)
“[The track] is weirdly accurate in a sense,” Raski said. “It’s very Numan-ish, and to get my sound to sound anywhere close to Numan is weird. He’s this massive pioneer so I have a lot of respect for him.”
Check out a (surprisingly good) remix of Cryptocracy track “Bug Party,” done by Korn’s Jonathan Davis, above, then download the free “Bug Party” MP3 (right-click and “Save As”).[#iframe: https://more-deals.info/images_blogs/underwire/2012/04/HUORATRON-BUG-PARTY-JDEVIL-CATHOLIC-NUN-REMIX.mp3?_=1]
