Being in a bit of a remix frame of mind, I couldn't restrain myself from entering this spring's Bowie mash-up contest. As part of the rules/promotion for the latest album, one had to choose at least one new Bowie song. Sadly, they're largely uncompelling, but I picked "Bring Me the Disco King," which had a decent trip-hoppy vibe, and still had some dynamic range left in it--it's astonishing; everything else is squashed flat and clipped all to hell.

Perhaps inevitably, his people didn't dig what I was doing, and it never got to the finals. The general concept seems to have been taking two Bowie songs (one new one required), beat-matching them, and playing a bar or two from one, a bar or two from the other, blah blah blah. It seemed waaaay too easy, so I got rather more granular. What they wanted was people taping pages from two books together, but I was more interested in slicing things up at the letter and serif level. That's a challenge.

I imported the new tune sample into Ableton Live, along with some other stuff from "Heroes." I went through the tunes looking for good little loops, and isolated some in an .aiff editor, but in practice I ended up grabbing bits from the full tracks from within Live. I took a basic loop from the new track to set up a reference groove, and then put the other stuff over the top. Initially, it concentrates on that groove, but I then drop out pieces, throw in the other stuff, and torture the samples with pitch and time distortions. I couldn't use Live's grid feature, though, as a lot of what I was doing required very small samples arranged at brief intervals--I went all IDM on this stuff. I think it hangs together, even though the contest people weren't into it.

Until I'm told otherwise, the result can be found here.