Audio Technology magazine are running a remix competition and you can hear my entry above and the original tune below.
The Occupants' track offered a lot of possibility, as well as excellent musicianship, and my remix is composed entirely from samples taken from their stems. I wanted to create a remix that took the material into a different tempo and mine is 113 BPM compared to their 166.
I also was thinking about something Marc Weidenbaum phrased in an interview recently when discussing remixes:
I remember being astonished by how listening to the remix could kind of make you completely rethink the way that you relate to the original, and that moment was really important, realizing that altering something does not detract from the original, but can enrich your understanding of it.
Ethan Hein picked up on this too and has written:
There is no worthwhile work of art that isn’t derivative. Bad art is insufficiently derivative of too few different sources.
Which leads me to confess that inspiration for my remix came from emulating another tune. When I thought of my favourite remixes and what approach to take, I remembered the approach taken by a talented producer named Charlie Van Pelt who used to post on the Ninja Tune Forum as Czar Kastik. I used a remix he made about 10 years ago as a scaffold for my track, which is the first time I've tried this approach and found it surprisingly easy and effective. It's an idea I'd previously discounted but reconsidered after learning the Beastie Boys have did the same thing on one of their best tracks.
