Great Southern Land: 1982 Original vs 2023 Cassian Remix

 

Recent Iva Davies with his ancient CMI II

The 1982 Great Southern Land has become a classic Australian track.  Iva Davies used a CMI in the making of this, a machine I was involved with myself at the time.  I never met him when I worked at Fairlight though. Just briefly in the Roland Service department before I moved to Japan the first time. 

If you don't know the original, this is it:

A few months ago YouTube decided to show me a recent Sydney Morning TV spot with Iva chatting about the track, his history and the renewed interest since the Cassian remix came out.  

A remix?? Cassian??

Conveniently YouTube has the Cassian remix:

And I must say it sounds great. Thought at the time, "I must see what he is doing with that awesome bass synth sound, drums and production".  Started doing that this morning, while waiting for a customer to get back to me about an illustration and quote.

I made this little 14 seconds that demonstrate that it looks like most of the original tracks have been high pass filtered, so that when the new bass, drum and synth parts come in, the impact is dramatic, shown with the dramatically increased low end spectral information. What a great sound. 

If you compare the original Ice House (Iva Davies band, even if he was mostly solo at the time of making this) track chorus with the remix chorus, you see the original has more low end in it, but nothing like the remix.  

Looking at what else makes the remix "more compelling" also seems to be it is a little faster.  The original track is 120BPM and the remix 124BPM, as far as I can tell using the TAP TEMPO function on my metronome.

All interesting to know.  I still need to work out what that bass sound is, and try using it in a track of my own, so this investigation isn't finished yet. It does look like he uses the Vital - Spectral Warping Wavetable Synth for his bass sounds though.  Listening to his remix on headphones on repeat, shows there are many interesting things going on.  This is another rabbit hole for me to fall into 😀 .

I was curious about REMIXING way before I saw this 2017 issue of Computer Music magazine. So curious in fact that I bought the super expensive EXPRESS DELIVERY issue, rather than wait 3 months for sea freight to deliver the normally expensive overseas magazines to far off Australia.

Till now I have only done one real remixing experiment in 2017 that I blogged about here.  But had previously blogged about the remix in the SPAWN MOVIE Soundtrack.  Specifically the Filter "Can't you trip like I do?", that I took decades to realize was a remix and nothing like the CRYSTAL METHOD original.

Cassian ??

Turns out Cassian is a Sydney DJ/ remixer/ producer, that is now American based. Looks like he knows his EDM stuff to me. 

His main tool is ABLETON LIVE. Live DJing is what he has mostly done. There are a fair few interview Q&As with him on various websites, and he doesn't seem to have any problem sharing his production techniques.  On Spotify, his popular tracks seem to all be remixes. I have more to learn about and from him.   His 2020 debut album, Laps is all Ableton LIVE, a Prophet 6 and Minimoog Model D and I need to have a listen now... On Spotify it is here.

I have a soft spot for 90s style synth based Techno and Cassian hits that spot. Maybe called EDM now, but I just see it as Techno. 

EDIT: 2024/2/9 Have investigated more and found that Cassian's DJ sets includes tracks from other artists, such as Anyma and Pryda and they are basically all in the genre Melodic Techno. There are lots of blog posts and YouTube videos about how to make that genre too.  The standard DJ thing is all a bit repetitive, but have been playing with adding some of the techniques to me own work. 

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