Many remixes involve little remixing at all. Often as not, a so-called remix entails someone cutting up a pre-existing track, rather than working with the individual elements (bass, drums, vocals, what have you) that were mixed to achieve the original. The laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits, thus, deserves double credit for lending a song, “Colors Shifting,” to the latest remix contest at ccmixter.org (specifically ccmixter.org/ghostly). Not only has he made his music freely available to be mangled by anonymous web-based musicians; he has gone above and beyond in providing sufficient resources. Between vocal tracks, isolated sound sources, several mixes and “the original distortion tracks,” we’re talking about well over 100 gigabytes of sound (available in a variety of file formats). Just to produce one song.
And as always with open-source remix projects such as this, the individual tracks can have their own inherent listening value. One set of sounds provided as part of the contest includes five tracks: drums, French horn, guitar, strings and synth. If you’re a fan of Willits’, the guitar track will be a real eye-opener; considering how he’s usually heard funnelling his six-string through a massive feedback loop programmed in the Max/MSP language, it’s a rare opportunity to hear him unembellished. You can also get the full song, a mere seven megabytes of his characteristically intoxicating, centerless guitar layers, off his latest solo album, Surf Boundaries, on the Ghostly International label (MP3). More info at christopherwillits.com.