To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, "Sometimes a remix is just a remix."

And so it is with "You Fell (Droid Mix)" - there's no particular metaphorical, quasi-conceptual highbrow content here; this is basically an industrial-rock throwdown, albeit one with a sense of humor.

The jumping-off point for the "Droid" mix was the very Nine Inch Nails-esque verses from "You Fell," as well as the almost laughably heavy and intense, quasi-nu metal guitar riffing from the original. At one point I thought about nudging the track even further into rap-metal territory for the remix, toying with the possibility of bringing in a guest rapper (the list of candidates was about as absurd as you could possibly imagine...), but this remix ultimately veered closer to Trent Reznor than to Fred Durst.

To me, this remix is quite tongue-in-cheek, though admittedly some of the humor is so deadpan that I'm not even sure I'm in on the joke. The heavy choruses sound really good to me, but it's also the kind of thing that's a bit difficult to take seriously, particularly as the increasing layers of feedback and noise build up. The squealing burst of noise and jungly drums that bookend the "you rebel scum" section is a bit too over-the-top to escape self-parody, and the two-measure break towards the very end, where a paper-thin drum loop and bass line drop in at the exact same volume as the giant hyper-compressed chorus which immediately follows it, still makes me laugh out loud.

A lot of credit for the sound of this track needs to go to drummer Chris G, for such fantastic original performances, and engineer Darin DiPietro, who captured the sound of his playing so well. Even though the drum parts are seriously tweaked, effected, and chopped-up on this remix, they're still based on the sonic DNA of the original tracks, and having such well-recorded and performed source material makes a big difference. For this kind of production, I'd usually isolate one individual drum microphone track - just the snare mic signal, for instance, or just the stereo recording of the ambient room mic's - process them with any number of effects plug-ins, and frequently chop up the drum parts into different fragments, which could then be cut-and-pasted into new, different rhythms.

But again - all of this post-performance tweaking ultimately only works as well as the source material that's being tweaked in the first place. So if you like the sound of this track, much credit must go to misters G and Di Pietro; if you don't dig it, then I'll take the blame for ruining their hard work.

About half of the drums on this remix came from the parts Chris G played on the song "Truth," which was played at a completely different tempo than "You Fell." So the "Truth" drums had to be digitally truncated in order to fit into the higher BPM of "You Fell," in addition to being further chopped up and pitch-shifted once they'd been compressed to fit the faster speed. (The drum performance from "Truth" probably shows up in more places on "half-pint demigod" than any other single element from "Any Raw Flesh?". Partly because I'd requested the entire drum performance from that song, and partly because of the enormous amount of variety Chris G brought to his arrangement on "Truth," it turned out to be a deeply flexible and malleable production element. One of the biggest "easter eggs" for a patient listener is to hear the numerous different places where the drums from that song show up in more-or-less recognizable shapes.)

I also have to give credit to Tobe Ramsey, who played bass on the original version of "You Fell," and whose parts had so much attitude and impact that they ended up as substantial elements of all three remixes of that song. Shawn made the comment that cut-and-pasted bass line for the "Droid" mix made him think of the infamous Frank Zappa "dancing face," which I'll take as a serious compliment. Another fun detail is that both Tobe and Bryan Beller appear on this remix; Bryan shows up as a series of deep bass stabs (spliced together from "What Have We Here," if I recall) which underpin the drum-and-bassy interludes around the "you rebel scum" section.

"You Fell (Droid Mix)" is, along with "No More Evil (Science Fiction Mix)," probably the closest that "half-pint demigod" gets to "normal" remix territory. It's certainly the "hit single" of the album, and amidst an album filled to the tipping point with intellectual baggage, it's nice to have a (relatively) unpretentious track like this.

Andre LaFosse
25 November 2005