Many years ago, I played some jazz with Catherine Sikora. She was a fierce and excellent saxophonist then, and her playing has only grown in the time since. In the past few years, Catherine has been releasing a series of albums of solo and duo improvisation. That takes a lot of confidence! Her lines are abstract and angular, but they have their own strong internal logic, and she has effortless control over a range of tones and timbres.
When I hear “unaccompanied solo instrument recording,” my producer brain instantly says, “Remix!”
Catherine graciously gave me permission to remix some of her solo tracks. I started with her 2016 album Jersey.
I screen-recorded the process of remixing “Tassels on the Day,” and did my best to narrate as I went. This was my first time documenting making a track. I only made minimal edits, so you’re seeing my flow in real time. As you can see, the process is a mostly improvisational one. The end result doesn’t sound much like jazz, but my life as a jazz player was the best preparation for making music this way.
Normally I would approach this kind of thing using classic breakbeats and Duke Ellington loops, but Catherine asked that I not use any copyrighted samples. So instead, I’m sticking to beats and synths that I programmed from scratch, along with a few royalty-free loops. Hear the finished remix:
I made one of the beats with Ableton’s 909 kit and the other with the Figure app. I made the background synth texture with the Animoog app. All other sounds you hear are samples of Catherine. Here’s how I treated them, in order of appearance:
- Looped, lightly quantized, with some delay
- Single note played back on a Simpler instrument through reverb
- Single multiphonic note sliced up and played back MPC-style through distortion and delay
- Short sample radically timestretched in Beats mode for stutter effect, with Beat Repeat, auto filter and delay
- Unquantized phrases through dub echo
Here’s how the structure looks:
So why am I doing this? I’m not trying to “improve” Catherine’s music. It already succeeds on its own terms. I think of it more as making new music, with Catherine’s music as a basis, like composing classical variations or doing jazz arrangements of standards. Joe Schloss points out that when you loop a sample, you aren’t just repeating it. You’re juxtaposing the end of the loop with its beginning, creating a musical relationship that wasn’t present in the original. By layering different samples simultaneously, you can realize all these relationships that were latent in the original track.
Music is so much about attention. Catherine’s music is the product of deeply focused attention, and it requires you to give the same deep level of attention as you listen. I am not usually capable of this level of focus. I do better when the music is structured to help me focus. Loop-based music is an advanced technology for focusing attention. The repetition helps you attend to timbral and rhythmic nuances that you’d miss after a single listen. Digital effects can act as “audio highlighting,” heightening or exaggerating certain sonic features (while distorting or obscuring others.) The remixing process also helps me focus my listening. When I listen like a producer, I’m paying more active attention, thinking about the potential of different sections to be loops or samples, thinking about what to cut and what to repeat. After doing the remix, I can listen back to the original and experience it as being full of memorable hooks, rather than a series of abstractions. Even if no one ever heard the remix, it would still be a worthwhile creative experience. But I’m also glad that people get to hear it!