A few months ago my old friend Astrotek offered me a chance to remix his newest track “Solar Orbit,” free from restriction to genre or even time frame to release. His Original Mix is decidedly psytrance, crafted in his meticulously layered and carefully balanced style, with a flair for space exploration motifs. Internally I was a little hesitant to accept at first – trance is a genre well outside my wheelhouse after all – but I wanted to take it on both as a personal challenge and as an opportunity to honor an old friendship that was forged through music.
Astrotek and I go way back to tracking days, trading 3.5″ floppies with S3Ms, questionably legal software (and often data errors) at school. We both looked up to the demoscene savants of the time, while also drawing inspiration from VGM, techno, jungle, drum&bass, and eventually the wider gamut of electronic music becoming available in the early Napster era. So our early years in production paralleled each other closely, but our paths in life diverged as we entered adulthood.
Still, every once in awhile he would reach out and we’d catch up, talk about music and life, maybe even do a remix once in awhile. I’ve never been great at being the friend who stays in touch so I think part of my motivation to do this project was also an expression of appreciation for that. I’ve also written previously about my reverence for the recognition of one’s origins in creative pursuits, and in a way collaborating on a project like this touched closely on that vein.
As to the remix itself – initially my instinct was to try a drum&bass flavored take on it, but my attempts felt stale and lacking a spark of inspiration. After some weeks I scrapped my first attempts and tried a shuffled, vaguely 2-step/uk garage-ish approach. To me that captured more of the fun, lighthearted EDM spirit of the original with a sufficiently open canvas to play with sound design, glitches, drum fills and other details. In the end I had a lot of fun working on it, breaking free from some of my usual conventions and trappings, and I hope that enjoyment is conveyed through the track itself.
Check out the full release here: Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp
Josh Barnett 