Working on another great one for
Complexions Contemporary Ballet.
This time I’m creating a
remix of a Lenny Kravitz track
from his most recent record, Raise Vibration. Another fun and challenging job. Love Rocks world premier will be at the
Joyce in Chelsea
on January 21st. Really proud of this one. I’ve been working with Dwight Rhoden and Complexions going all the way back to 2004, 16 years now. We’ve created a fantastic body of work together. The remixes we’ve produced are some of the more creative and satisfying work I’ve been a part of.
I think without exception, every time Dwight and I get together to work on music he’s in crunch mode for an upcoming ballet; it’s coming down to the wire and his opening date is roughly a week away. He’s usually coming directly from rehearsal where he’s been working out the movement with the company. He’ll have a handful of tracks on his computer to build from, video of the rehearsals (years ago that video was a little mini DV cam, he’d fast forward and rewind to cue up the video to watch it against the music), and a sound in his head along with an idea as to what he envisions working with the choreography.
How we get there, is generally wide open. There are rarely any predefined margins.
We’ll start grabbing bits and pieces from different tracks – harvesting as Dwight calls it – layering pieces over each other. We’ll go in multiple directions, trying different ideas, possibly needing to back out of one idea and move forward into another. “This works”, “this doesn’t”; grab from “here” and mix with “that”. Slowly a new texture appears out of the layered tracks, or maybe a rhythm builds, or a pattern establishes itself. And soon we begin to feel the inspiration coming out of the speakers, the track begins to dictate what it needs.
For this piece of music,
Lenny Kravitz’s, “We Can Get It All Together”,
this was the first time Dwight and I weren’t able to sit down together, shoulder to shoulder, to collaborate in 16 years. And not because of the coronavirus, this was still December of 2019, but because I was in Helsinki with a new baby; traveling to NYC wasn’t an option for me.
Before diving in, Dwight gave me a rough idea what he wanted to create; the mood, the tone, the energy; he knew he wanted the organ loop. He sent me video of the rehearsals along with a rough running time, plus direction to grab vocals from the song and play with them over the organ loop.
Dwight was in touch with Lenny, and Lenny was fully on board with us playing with his tracks. Very trusting of him. Not many artists have let us do that in the past. The only trick was that I wasn’t given any stems from the song, so I didn’t have an isolated vocal to work with. Fortunately, technology had just recently caught up with some of the ideas that were in Dwight’s head. Using
iZotope RX 7’s Music Rebalance
and a bit of trial and error, I was able to pull out a handful of vocal lines that I thought would work well together.
I started building the intro of the song. I was looking to keep the mood and sound of what Lenny created. I also knew I wanted to build tension; start very minimally, gradually layer the complexity, evolve into chaos with an eventual crescendo, dramatically drop out, then seamlessly slip into the song to let it play out. Using the vocal harvests, I came up with a development that I felt could pull this off, not just musically, but lyrically and emotionally.
I wanted to create a few different colors for the vocal bites. For this I automated a handful of EQs and dialed in different effects, including
unfilteredaudio’s Dent 2
and UAD’s very cool emulation of
Thermionic Culture’s Culture Vulture
mixed with
UAD’s Fender ’55 Tweed Deluxe
emulation. This gave me some different flavors of distortion, one that was fairly spiky and sharp, another that had a healthy amount of aggressive crunch.
Finishing off my palette of colors and space, I used
Brainworx’s subsynth
to pull even more low end out of Lenny’s organ loop and
Eventide’s Tverb
to create space around a few of his vocals lines. Tverb is a very cool, very different kind of reverb. Eventide and Tony Visconti worked together to port his legendary reverb trick from
David Bowie’s “Heroes”
tracked at
Berlin’s Hansa Studios,
to a plug-in. A quick simplified explanation of the origin of this; Tony setup three room mics at different distances, after the mics he patched in gates, as the dynamics of David’s vocal oscillated, the gates would open and close creating distinct reverb sounds for different vocal volumes.
Lastly, I experimented with reversing a vocal line. This worked well, it made it easy to keep this particular vocal bite out of the way of the other textures while also helping create that evolution into chaos I was looking for.
I wanted all of this to swell and pulse as it led to the opening of the song. I decided to automate a few different sends and push them in different ways into the distortions and filters, creating a lot of good chaos. Actually at moments, it also created a decent amount of not good chaos; I needed to stay aware of my audience, I didn’t want to offend anyone’s ears with a lot of sharp, icy distortion. So I ran the return into a multiband compressor, taking a bit of that sharp edge off, some of that 4k, when it became too much.
Then for some final extra weight, I layered a sample of an airplane taking off under the build. You can barely hear it buried in the mix, although if I removed it, you’d feel it’s absence.
There are so many great pieces of music that Dwight and I put together over the years, I’ll try to post more of these sound collage harvests at another time.
(edited Nov 2020)
Remix - Lenny Kravitz, Love Rocks, for Complexions BalletCFolta
