A Rogue Mix is when you take a band member's laptop (perhaps when he's out of town), open the project file he's working on, finish it with liberal artistic choices, and release the track while he's still in Las Vegas. This may not sound like an established practice in the music industry. This is because I invented it yesterday. It's Wilson's fault for leaving town sporadically on a Sunday. In any event, the track needed to get done, and I consider an impromptu adventure to be a concession of artistic control. It better be, I hit save in the project file as opposed to save as.
Wilson has, in conversation, shown a fascination with mirrors as vessels to fabric landscapes; realities we build, often to exceedingly intricate degree, for the sake of storytelling. In one such landscape of his ward, barriers between a familiar world and an expressionist dream are constrained to mirrors; and, for each of us, the other side confines an alter ego.
Oh, I like that term. Fabric landscapes. It's a thing, now.
In this mix of Galaxy Eye, I built a bridge to Wilson's landscape through character and verse. I entered his story as his alter self through an old oak mirror. Here is the message I wrote to him from the other side:
"I awoke with a start. My hands were burning; covered in bandages, wet with new blood. In a haze, I rushed to the bedroom mirror. The glass had shattered, but an image was etched into the empty space. A message written in my handwriting. It read 'Sing an anthem for fallen angels.'"
In the mix, I recorded backing vocals to establish a presence as Wilson's image in the mirror. I automated the volume on the backing, pushing forwards and pulling back the alter's presence in the mix in accordance with rising and falling levels of intensity within the arrangement. Becoming a distorted, expressionistic replica of an artist within the constraints of his own fabric landscape was, to say the least, mood altering.
Here's the track: Galaxy Eye
Posted Monday, Mar 18th 2013 @ 11:09