It’s All Such Bullshit

Interlude 1: That Death Cat

“I’ve seen a figure in a cape…” *LAUGH* YEAH!!! This is just a lyricless interlude tune. Almost like having a skit (remember when every damn rap album had skits?), but music, not a skit. The drums are sampled again! They’re a sample from Fun Lovin Criminals, and it’s sped up. Again, fuck you RIAA. Then there’s samples from The Frighteners (one of the all time great cult classics! So fun!) and then a sample from Braveheart, just for cheese I guess.

The dumb thing on this is I don’t know what I was doing, if maybe I was too lazy or something, but I don’t fade the Braveheart sample out in a good spot or anything. There’s all the commotion of dudes talking and it just cuts off. I should have cut it off at “I go to make sure that they have it” but somehow I just didn’t do it. WTF? The Frighteners sample is that way too. Somehow I just left this extra bit in where the guy goes “i’ve studied the coroner’s reports from every d—” and i just cut him off mid word! The end of that sample was supposed to be, in my mind it was, in my artistic sense, the end of it for ME, is “you killed your wife!” “NO!!!”

But somehow I just let it go on. WHAT THE FUCK, AARON???

I actually convinced myself that the Braveheart sample fit the theme of the record at the time. I think the whole bit about squabbling for the scraps from the King’s table. But also, the part where he says “why? why is that impossible?” That’s basically my whole thing, and that’s what NQuit really means. Yes it’s “never never quit” but really the more important part of the never never quit philosophy to me is the idea that anything is possible. So that whole thing of him doing the impossible, that was verification that I wasn’t the only one trying to say that.

So I put it on the record, using some kind of twisted logic to tell me that that fit the theme. Actually the logic still makes sense to me, now that I think about it *mad scientist furrow*

You Waited Too Long, by M.C. Murph

Let it be known, beatches!, that long before Limp Biskit and all these fucking wankers, and even before I heard Rage Against The Machine (but not before they were doing it), I was doing rap to rock guitars!!

I actually played this guitar part, and the bass part, which was actually done with the guitar as well. I used my blue Yamaha electric and yamaha practice amp, which my dad gave me for my 16th birthday and it was a total surprise. I came home and there was my dad playing the blues on this new guitar. I miss the FUCK out of that guitar now, because of the sentimentality. I never learned to really play it, and now I realize it’ll take a miracle and decades to ever play even close to as good as my dad, but I did use it to record stuff.

In fact now that I remember, this isn’t the first song I did with rock guitars either. The first was called “Spiderweb”, and it was on my first CD, and I’ll try to find that for ya some time.

I like the way I did the intro drums on this. I played the drum beat through my headphones and mic’d the headphones. You can hear the fans in the room in the intro. *laugh*

Lyrically this song is kinda fucked up. It goes “you took something away from me red head” - how is that remotely universal? It’s not. It’s about how my girlfriend had “cheated on me” (ie: made out with this red headed dude) and I found out a YEAR LATER, and I had freaked out and got all angry and abusive about it, and finally “came out on top” and this was this victory song about how I still had my girl and fuck you you mother fucker. It’s SO not how I would react or deal with things now. It’s so incredible and violent and just stupid.

There’s some clever stuff though. There’s a double layered metaphor in the first verse, for example. The whole song has a metaphor of the robber coming in and stealing my stuff, representing my relationship, my trust, etc. But then I say:

you came into my home
you took my fuckin telephone
you took my pictures and you took my diamonds and my pearls
you took my stereo you took my fuckin vcr
you took the youngest one in curls

*LaUGH* i love that hee hee. Instead of saying TV, I give you a metaphor FOR the TV - the youngest one in curls - The Brady Bunch. Which rhymes with pearls. That just makes me giddy.

I also like the line “if you could you’d take my face”

Also interesting to me is I’m kinda listing the contents of our apartment at the time. Specific shit, like I say “you took the money in the face and if you could you’d take my place”

“The Face” was this jar we kept our loose change we were saving in. It had a carved face on it, it was really weird. We called it “The Face”. I also like the line “you took the car and the chase” *laughs and laughs* and my weird accent on “you took my alabaster, bastard!” *LAUGhs AND LAUGHS*

And the other crazy thing I just figured out is this is a laundry list of shit I don’t care about now. TV’s, cars, cable TV, money. Well, I still want money. But yeah.

But just like in other tunes of this time, there is this thing in the lyrics that I think is brilliant without having known it. During the chorus, there’s a little weird version of me saying “too much thinkin and not enough flowin too much thinkin and not enough knowin”. That has nothing to do with the song. I did that a lot in those days, and kinda still do if I’m not careful. I’ll have lyrical elements in the chorus, or a whole chorus, which has nothing to do with the verses. Sometimes this randomness sort of creates interesting marriages, sometimes it’s just stupid. But in this song, it’s funny because out of this entire soup of violence and idiocy, where I sound like a pimply teenager (but I was never actually pimply, for the record) trying to be macho, and the throw away line, the one that I was just putting in there because I had no idea what the hell to do, is the one with real weight.

Too much thinking and not enough knowing. That’s deep, wigga.

Rule Rope, by M.C. Murph

Eeee. I’m almost afraid to present this. I actually drove around in black neighborhoods in Indianapolis bumping the fuckballs out of this song. Scary idiot.

And I said “nigga” - this was when I was with Larrisse and I was basically indoctrinated. She called me nigga, I called her bitch. Seriously. Those weren’t derrogatory terms for us. People who think a lot usually call foul on that. Lot of slam poems out there about not using the N word even if you do think of it as brotherhood.

But this was before I’d heard all that. What I notice right now is that this album REALLY has a theme - it’s ALL about major label hip hop and r&b and the problem with it. Every song is about that except a couple. I actually still think this Rule Rope thing is clever and I actually can still stand behind what I’m saying.

I’m saying, ok, here you are, Black America, and you’re a big super star making money with your songs, and what are you putting forth? Stuff about how you’re a thug or you’re a womanizer, cocaine this, cocaine that, and if there WERE a conspiracy against Black America, some of the stuff super star artists are saying and doing is exactly what the enemy would want them to be saying and doing. I mean if you want to keep a group of people down, just encourage them through your mass media to do things that are bad for them.

Of course, when you get into it, you realize that the executives of these big companies are WHITE. And you really start to get suspicious. Of course, what I’m saying in this song is that WE’RE doing it to OURSELVES down here in the streets. And it’s NOT just Black artists, or Black America - it’s anyone who’s not in “power”, keeping ourselves down with ridiculous violent misogynistic drug addled bullshit.

Of course, I don’t believe that white record executives are sitting there going “ok let’s release this guy because he says dumb shit and he’ll keep black people down”. This kind of bad habit doesn’t work that way. It’s subtle, it’s deep under the surface, and usually, corporate America just keeps in place whatever we show them we’ll buy. So usually, they keep in place what’s familiar, because that sells. So in the end, WE have the power. Of course, those assholes could help out too, but I don’t expect their greedy asses to any time soon. Whoever THEY are.

Anyway this song is exactly the same song as that super popular hilarious diddy that came around more recently:

I think DMite does a better job with this message than I did with Rule Rope, and here’s why: He tells you something to do. I tell you what we’re doing wrong, he gives you a solution. I think that’s a crucial difference, and it’s a mistake I made a lot back then, in music and in life.

So you go, dmite.

Disappear, by M.C. Murph

This one I remember felt like this break through. I felt like it sounded more “real”. From day 1 of doing any music, I’ve always just been trying to figure out how to make something sound like “real” music, as opposed to pretend stuff from pretend synthesizers. It’s funny because I’ve realized that’s my whole life. Growing up in Taos was all about the homemade thing. Then there’s school, and everything being a pretend project. That’s why I released these first two M.C. Murph CD’s and made the NQuit label. I was in school doing this as projects but it was so ridiculous to me to do pretend work that would never see the light of day. I still hate that. I did the same thing in my master’s program at Stanford. I have yet to release the work I did there, but it’s in the queue and will be out this year. I just can’t get into pretending.

Unfortunately EVERYTHING I do sounds pretend and fischer price to me. But this one I liked at the time so much because I didn’t do the drums. I sampled them. Yes that’s right, very illegal. I have no idea from where. I’ve never made any money off it so fuck you, RIAA. The whole process of doing this song was odd and different to me. The way I synced the sampled drums and edited them together and created a MIDI sequence and did the vocals. I remember also that I did these vocals, most of the vocals from Artistic Apocalypse, at home. I had done the vocals from the previous CD, Martyrs And Heroes, in a real studio, Ubik Sound. But at this time, I was working at KNME Channel 5 (public television) and I took one of their ADATS home and sync’d it to the MIDI sequencer and did the vocals in the closet. Some of these vocals - if not all - were done using an AKG D1000E microphone, which can best be described as a very very shitty SM57. But I had a very quiet good sounding closet, and I think this is where I learned that the accoustic environment you’re recording in is usually much more important than the equipment you’re using. I oughtta keep that in mind now. I’m being a little haphazard about that the past few weeks.

I’ve shared Disappear with people before. I’m not the only one to have that feeling of wanting to become a shadow in this land. But for me that sentiment is a double edged sword and not necessarily good. Slipping through the cracks and feeling like I don’t or shouldn’t exist has been the bane of my existence, and the degree to which I’ve gotten past that feeling or any desire to have it is the degree to which I’ve succeeded in my career, and the degree to which I’ve found happiness. I think it’s important NOT to disappear in life, and NOT to become shadow and mystery. Reveal yourself, share yourself, and you find love. Unfortunately, at the time in my life when I recorded this, I was not such a person in the least. In fact, I was quite a twisted person, to be honest.

However, I do still truck with one notion in this song (which I also did as a slam poem for a while):

underneath silk sounds because the music never fakes you
berates you or hates you or constantly debates you

This was me saying sometimes I don’t want to try to write lyrics, or figure out how to language something out, or win an argument (I think I was dropping my philosophy class at UNM right about this time), that there is a very powerful truth in pre-language, and that in melody, in sound that is NOT language, there is a clear message, a communication, that is best left UNdescribed (so excuse me if I’m not describing it well here!). Also that I sometimes seek comfort in that pre-language place that music sits. You can also see that I was never into debate. I hated arguing or trying to “prove” what I knew. I still hate that. When I moved to Houston, I was running in these intellectual circles, and certain people, I just ended up refusing to talk to at all. I eventually developed a pretty fast rule that I would not engage in debate. Later, I read things that justified me and untwisted my feeling about this into something better than it was. At the time of Disappear, I was a 19 year old college hockey player with an ego problem, and what it usually turned into was kicking your ass if you questioned me.

But it was deeper than that, and I suspect that it is in fact deeper than that for most “don’t argue with me” ass kickers. What it really is is that underneath somewhere, I’m too aware that reality is maliable, and too aware that everything I could possibly say can be easily counteracted, to go around trying to prove things without driving myself crazy. When I was told by one spiritual teacher that there is no such thing as “THE Truth”, only “truth”, it really helped me start to unwind that. Finally I’m getting to a place of being unwound on that enough to not be violent. It’s taken a long time, though.

Inspiration! I wrote this in my private journal, and thought “well fuck you should post that on the music blog” At this point the readership isn’t different between the two, but the idea is it may be sometime.

Here tis:

So I have this wild fan in Oakland - not a person I met living in Oakland. This guy, Craig, has an online radio station, and a new site called BuddyFetch which is kind of this crazy search tool that finds people’s IM addresses based on their interests and such - where you can go looking out in the non-browsered cybersphere for people of like mind, which is kind of a wicked concept to me.

Anyway I think Craig was DJing or writing some publication about - oh 13 years ago or so. Or 15? Hell. He has a BUNCH of my old recordings - I mean OLD - like from before I ever did a CD. He has cassette tape demos I did when I was like 17 or 18.

He found me again and reconnected and is totally about how I’m fucking badass and creative and compared to me Eminem is a fucking douchebag (which may be, who knows). He’ll get on IM and shoot me a message quoting some old song - now bear in mind these are REALLY bad recordings, distorted as fuck, made with pause loop taping and crappy synths and no knowledge and burned out radio shack mics and - just holy bad. And sick, angry, twisted violent stuff, a lot of it. Nothing way out there like Eminem or ICP, no shit like I might say nowadays for fun, like “HEY MOTHER FUCKER GONNA CUT YOUR ARMS AND LEGS OFF AND USE ‘EM FOR FIREWOOD, BUT BEFORE I DO THAT I’M GONNA SHOVE A CORN DOG IN YOUR MOTHER’S ASSHOLE AND WATCH IT COME OUT HER EAR AND EAT THE BRAINS OFF THE END FOR FIBER SO I CAN SHIT IN A CANISTER AND SEND IT TO IRAN, BUT HEY IT’S ALL GOOD!” (see how that actually rhymed?), just, I was angry and young and I’m almost embarassed that some dudes are still big fans of my whole “i’ll fuck you up!” era. Examples of some lyrics Craig likes:

“thin kids gonna fuck you up!”

“fuck me up fuck me up fuck me up”

“mutha fuckin heroes, got me bleedin in a dixie cup”

That last one is actually worth revisiting I think. But that’s another topic.

So anyway that reminded me to make a new music blog post and up next in my queue to talk about was Artistic Apocalypse, which I think Craig has as well. It’s a couple years newer than the oldest stuff. And I was listening to some of it just now expecting it to just suck so bad but now I feel all empowered because dude’s right on one point at least: I’m so fuckin creative - or I was *shrug* *laugh* I’m so all over the map and man I was breaking every fucking rule I had no idea wtf I was doing but I was ROCKIN it dude. WOOT!!!

And I also expected all the lyrics to be violent angry machismo, but they’re not. Yes I was violent and macho, and it shows big time, but there’s some real concepts man, that frankly, I can still get behind a lot of ‘em. Like this one that’s playing right now in my speakers:

corporate identity
confusion of humanity
major label conspiracy
industrial hipocracy

i don’t really care just who you are
i ain’t hitchin my wagon to a black hole

I mean sure i’m pissed off and saying yo a lot, like a dumbass, because I’m from fuckin Taos - maybe if I said “you’re just another one of their rich whores, esse” it would be less dumb. Of course I still say yo alot, yo. anyway but yeah - FUCK you fuckers! *shakes fun fist* *funnly shakes fist* *fist shaking booty shake* *truck punch*

Oh fine, Steve and Mischief and Spec and whoever else, here: Quietly Manic, by M.C. Murph

Now this a music blog all of a sudden. I might repost this up there later. or part of it.

Actually I think [my friend] Spec saw me perform that one live. I did two, count ‘em two, shows where i performed Artistic Apocalypse songs live. Not sure which ones I did. It was at Word [a poetry show I used to run with The Outsider, of Word. fame, and Tamara Nicholl, of Third Option fame], and just to be nice and small worldish, the 2nd show, the bigger one, where I might have done this tune, was at Monte Vista Fire Station [in Albuquerque] at Word. on the night that [my friend] Shanti and Spec met [and subsequently dated for five years, lived together, bought a house, and broke eachother's hearts and broke up - sorry guys - love you both though still!].

I also puked on the bar at Monte Vista Fire Station years later on St. Patty’s Day right after getting dumped by aforementioned Tamara of Third Option fame, with Spec sitting on one side of me and Shanti sitting on the other. They rushed me to the bathroom where I sang along to some Irish tune playing OVER AND OVER which had some swear word bleeped out so I would yell “SHIT!!!” as loud as possible whenever it came up, and whenever someone came to pee in the urinal, I’d yell “SHOES!” I also was on Prosac at the time, which can react with large amounts of alcohol and kill you, I’d heard, so I was praying for my life.

I’m rambling.

Oh man. Remember when I was MC Murph?

Aww HELL no.

Advisory Intro, M.C. Murph - from “Artistic Apocalypse”

That’s how the last M.C. Murph record starts - with Larrisse, my then girlfriend, forever immortalized saying “the staff of nquit records would like to advise you that portions of the following program contain language which may be offensive to certain members of your family. listener discretion is advised”

Which makes me laugh. It’s also funny because I think that was the exact quote that the hip-hop show at KUNM, the campus radio station at UNM, was required to play before it got going. I mean, obviously, they had their own recording that didn’t get all jumbled.

The next track is this one:

Magnetic Poetry, by M.C. Murph

This is also an intro track - instrumental. It’s called Magnetic Poetry because the little phrases I’m saying/whispering are actual magnetic poetry phrases that were on me and Larrisse’s fridge for a really long time during that time. Also weird was I put together all that mish mash of voices in my electronic music class at UNM with Manny Rettinger, using this software called Deck, which I never touched again. I remember I kept that little chunk of audio on a zip disk. Zip disks came out, they were sort of little crosses between hard drives and floppies - more capacity. Then Jaz disks came out and were like a gig, and zip disks sort of went away.

My regret on this is that in the mastering stage of this record, I made most of the songs too bright and harsh, especially this one. I have the pre-master mix, i could fix it maybe, but i can’t fix it out in the world. It’s released, iTunes has it, Borders, Barnes And Noble, it’s in everybody’s catalog, and once that’s done, it’s that audio, period.

That explains to you why things like reissues or special editions come out. That’s so labels or artists can go back when new technology comes and fix something that they don’t like, and reissue it. I guess it wasn’t really that way before digital distribution though. I mean, before, you could sort of just have subsequent copies of a record or tape or even CD be different. Young M.C. did that. I had his tape a long time, and then it got eaten or melted or something, so I bought a new one. The last song on the first side was the same rap, but a totally different music sample. It shocked the hell out of me. WHAT THE HELL????

But now, once iTunes has ahold of it, they have THAT audio, and there’s no mechanism for you to change your audio. If you have to fix something, you do another release. Title it something else, new barcode, the works. “Artistic Apocalypse remastered version” or something. Maybe I should do that. The goddamned fucking distributor spelled half the goddamn song titles wrong. Go look:

Artistic Apocalypse on iTunes

The best typo is that they call the last song, which is called “Whinerz”, Whirlwheez - WHIRLWHEEZ????

God. *laugh*

Still, Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix

Ok. Lot to explain on this one! First of all, Murphurd. For those of you who know me as Murph, Murph is actually short for Murphurd. I got the name Murphurd freshman year in high school, damn near the first day. I was new to town. I was in science class, I asked this dude Andrew (I think) if he had a pencil. I was mumbling. I mumbling often then. He said “murphurd?”, you know how people do where they repeat the gibberish you sound like you’re saying? You say “are you here for pizza?” and they say “what? hurforpeets?” Well “do you have a pencil?” was somehow “murphurd?”. Like three times in a row. Finally I just gave up and said “yeah, Murphurd”.

From that moment on, partly because the dude didn’t know my name anyway, he just started calling me Murphurd. He never knew I was asking for a pencil. He just thought I was being a weirdo, all the more reason to name me what I was saying. I often WAS being a weirdo like that, (still am), and so it made sense, even though ironically, weirdo I was not being that particular time.

Of course Murphurd quickly shortened to Murphurd, but the honors class kids I went through all of high school with would be just as likely to call me Murphurd. All you cats who came around AFTER high school, when M.C. Murph and then just Murph were my stage names, you wouldn’t call me Murphurd. But cats from high school, they certainly might.

On to the word “slow”. Well, I thought this was so cool. I took I think the whole mix of the original Still track, minus vocals and played it back with this hard drive recorder called the Darwin I was using. The Darwin had a shuttle wheel, where you could hold it and turn it to play or fast forward or rewind. You could hold the wheel in one spot and have your audio play back at 2 times the speed, or 4, or even slow. If you held it right in the right spot, you could play a whole song back at the same screwy speed. Nowadays you can just tell some software to slow down or speed up something, and you could then too, but the software and computers were more expensive, and all I had was this Darwin machine. So I was playing it back with the wheel and did it slow one time, and it sounded neat. So what I did was, I put another Darwin on record (ok ok I had two - and they were like 3 grand a piece I admit) - wait did I have two at that time? I put SOMETHING on record at regular speed, and then I held that shuttle wheel in the exact right spot for like 10 minutes and recorded this mega slow version of the tune. Well it just so happened that the speed was a perfect multiple - I think a quarter - of the original speed. So what I could do was, I could bring in the normal speed song later and have it be perfectly in sync. And I put vocals in different spots, re-recorded the poem with me saying it, etc. We used this mix (minus the vocals, ’cause we were performing them) to start our Third Option show most of the time, actually. I always thought it was a neat mysterious intro. It comes on slow so you could sort of start it early and come to the stage just in time.

Anyway the result is the Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix, and that slow down process is why it’s a 10 minute long version. I guess I felt like I should use the whole thing *eyeroll*.

Oh I didn’t explain the unrequited love part. Well, at that time, there was a Third Option act, and we hadn’t done the Cult Of Nice record yet, and we were in Albuquerque and going all around doing our shtick, and the act was a duo, me and Tamara. But at that time me and Tamara weren’t dating. There was this kind of 9 month period between the time me and my girlfriend before had broken up where I was all about the getting with Tamara but she wasn’t all about the getting with me.

I guess sometime during the creation of the Still EP, we finally started moving that direction. I actually remember the date when we first “went beyond friends” (to put it politely), but not exactly where we were in the production process.

The point is, eventually, I named this mix the Unrequited Love Mix - I think because I did the whole thing in a sort of all night binge of disturbed creativity that was disturbed due to the unrequited love situation.

So it was quite a bold thing to say, seeing as how the subject of disturbance was IN THE BAND. Sort of like a Mama’s and Papa’s story I heard once.

Last piece of trivia: If you were to buy the disc, there’s a typo ion the cd packaging. It says “Muphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix” (missing an r in Murphurd).

Love to y’all!

Still Phase Motion Mix by Third Option

It seems like I was probably moving from one mix to the next, tweaking the next one based on the last. But I don’t necessarily remember.

Well what can I say about this version? It’s a little different. It’s - a …uhm. Here’s the thing, how about we just listen to it?

K.

Still Telephone Mix, by Third Option

Well obviously I called this version the Telephone Mix because I “telephoned” Tamara’s voice. I used to LOVE to use that telephone effect (which is achieved simply by cutting most frequencies and boosting the ones that the telephone picks up). I felt like if I made it purposefully fucked up, didn’t let you hear the full spectrum of the original sound, then you wouldn’t be able to hear that it was originally a low quality recording. It’s a good little trick.

This one’s a good bit different now that I’m listening. It’s a bit more ethereal. That ahh ahh ooh thing brings back all kinds of memories but the weird thing is, not really memories of that session or that time, or that version of my little studio. It kind of makes me think of Austin. Maybe we were touring that summer with the slam team or something to Austin. I know we went to Austin at some point around then. We rehearsed poems in Barton Springs. Tamara peed on me in the water.

Well, enjoy.

in the cities of grey slate buildings
all night marquees
and flashing billboards of Virginia Slim and Camel Joe
we stuff our ears at the 24 hour 7 day a week diner of
fiber optic chatter
photographers take our pictures and people watch our lips go up and down on television and toast us as one of the new top ten up and coming
but we
we will not go to the desert
we will not take off our clothes
or bear our hearts
or shut our mouths

<a href=http://www.nquit.com/sounds/ThirdOption/Still/02ThirdOptionStillFadeToBlackMix.mp3>Still Fade To Black Mix, by Third Option</a>

Something I really love that I might not expect someone like me to love, is remixes.  I don’t mean somebody sampling somebody else’s song and turning it into some mashup.  That’s a new thing that people are calling remixing but it’s not.  Remixes, to my mind, are new versions of songs that take the original multitrack audio and make a different version of the mix.  It’s not something you think about when you think about rock n roll live music and you think a recording is just a document of some player’s sound.  But really nowadays, and for a long time, the mixdown is a key part of the creative process and there’s WAY WAY more variability there than one might think.  You can even have a band play a song once, and totally change the character of the song, right down to actually changing the song.

You can do this without even rearranging by cutting, pasting, editing.  But then when you DO start cutting, pasting, editing, you also start into the notion of rearranging, which is an old old concept.  Arrangers in classical music are old-school remixers.  They take the basic “themes” of a work and make an original arrangement of it.  In some cases we have music from composers like Mozart or Beethoven or whoever and it’s not actually clear what the arrangement should be.  So the arrangement is the arranger’s creative contribution.  But it’s not a new song (or symphony or whatever).  It’s still considered the same song.  It still has the same title.  But there may be a footnote “Mozart’s Lost Sonota, arranged by Johnny Applebaum”.

This is what I think of when I think of remix.  The track I linked above is still “Still” (no pun intended) but it’s a different version.  The Still EP is 5 of these, and I totally remember where I first learned of this concept of the “maxi-single” in electronic music.  I was interning at KUNM 89.9 FM here in Albuquerque, and my job was to organize CDS and take home duplicates.  Well there was one CD, I forget the act or title, that was just that: an electronica act with one song (which I presumed was a hit from their full length CD) remixed in various ways.

I loved how I became familiar with the original song, and then I was hearing the same song, but with this new take.  All of the Still stuff is completely modeled after that CD, for example, where I’ve gone back to the MIDI file for the song, and for the Fade To Black Mix, all I’ve done is use different synth settings for some (but not all, which I think is key/neat) of the parts.  Like the former piano line becomes a vibraphone.  It gives the song this whole different character.

I also love the idea of DJs or big fans having access to these secret other versions of known stuff.  And usually there’s a bunch of different versions of something laying around just because in mixdown, a lot of times you do different things and decide later which one makes the cut on the album.  If the versions are different enough, releasing them as remixes seems like a great use for them and a great well of extra content.  That’s where I wouldn’t think I’d like the concept, because I’m not necessarily into being so desperate for content that you dredge up the same stuff over and over (like greatest hits albums - which are really just artists who have a contract to fulfill and no more material).  But since I like the discovery process in a remix/new arrangement, I do like it in this case.

Of course, the other cool thing is remixes are this great way to collaborate with other artists and reach new audiences, especially if you can get Big Name Electronica Artist or DJ X to do the “Still Paul Oakanfield Scratch My Back Mix”

Anyway I enjoy remixes.