Indian Summer - Foreign Formula (Cosmos Midnight Remix)

For the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea behind trends. What exactly are they, and what power do they have over both our quotidian and transcendental experiences. Clearly a hard question to answer in an electronic music website post, but hey, we do after all rely heavily on trends to reach out to people, the sole foundation of this website is dedicated to trends, specifically the remixing trend.

So for the music history lesson of the day here’s a little wiki segment about THE REMIX:

Modern remixing had its roots in the dance hall culture of late-1960s/early-1970s Jamaica. The fluid evolution of music that encompassed ska, rocksteady,reggae and dub was embraced by local music mixers who deconstructed and rebuilt tracks to suit the tastes of their audience. Producers and engineers like Ruddy Redwood, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry popularized stripped-down instrumental mixes (which they called "versions") of reggae tunes. At first they simply dropped the vocal tracks, but soon more sophisticated effects were created, dropping separate instrumental tracks in and out of the mix, isolating and repeating hooks, and adding various effects like echo, reverberation and delay. From the mid-1970s, DJs in early discothèques were performing similar tricks with disco songs (using loops and tape edits) to get dancers on the floor and keep them there. One noteworthy figure was Tom Moulton who invented the dance remix as we now know it. Though not a DJ (a popular misconception), Moulton had begun his career by making a homemade mix tape for a Fire Island dance club in the late 1960s.

Who knew, right? Anyway, today we are featuring a somewhat old track that caught my attention a couple of days ago for its extraordinary decomposition from original to remix. Cosmo’s Midnight has a heavy presence on CasaSwoop and that’s for a good reason. They style transformation that has been going on in Cosmo’s musical development is mesmerizing. A new air of maturity accompanies his new music, more complex composition and overall higher production or more refined production quality is increasingly noticeable. This song is a great example of that. Vocal sample is taken down a notch when compared to other more ‘jumpy’ remixes that feature heavy vocal sampling. The synth game is smooth and the overlaying of the beats eases the listener into every segment of the song. Further strengthening this stylistic ‘flow’ is the introduction of what perhaps I love the most about this piece: the bridges. This is an exciting territory for Cosmo’s music, which usually deals with high levels of multi-tracking, sampling and looping. The bridges are bringing a new element into his swag portfolio: a cleaner, pensive and restorative path, a sort of palad cleanser if you will, to get the listener ready for the next course.

Enjoy!

Indian Summer · Foreign Formula (Cosmo's Midnight Remix)

Mixmag · Indian Summer 'Foreign Formula'