Brought an Oboe to a Gun Fight

None of the music I write for myself has a deadline and I'm not one of those people who can fool themselves into thinking they have a deadline when they really don't. Whats the point? For the most part I'm under no pressure to get anything done at all. To counter this from time to time I enter a music competition just to put some heat on.

Every now and again I do get the pseudo-composer version of writers block and have found that if I enter a remix contest, the deadline gets me motivated. I get something done which comes with the obligatory sense of accomplishing something but as a byproduct, most of the time I get several ideas for projects of my own.

Sometimes I enter a contest because I have nothing else to do. Case in point, the Bleed Electric contest at Acid Planet. They offered the song Birds as High as Planes for remixing. The original was described as "An interesting track; think Electroclash meets Public Enemy via Kanye..." You get the idea. Bottom line, I didn't care for it. This was back in spring 2009 and I was way past auto tuned vocals besides all the other things I didn't really like about the track.

I wasn't going to enter but I started to listening to the other mixes and heard 20 different offerings that included sounds of breaking glass and sirens. The song is about a hold up gone bad, the cops are coming, they don't want to go to jail, blah blah blah. I got a little worked up because all those other mixes pissed me off.

I brought out my big guns for this wannabe gangsta sorta rap - xylophone, cello, orchestral strings, and of course... an oboe. O hell yes. Just to be as different from everyone else as I could. And I did it all because at the time I literally had nothing better to do.

Not that it matters. In the end, no one really cares but me. Of course I didn't win but I do like how it all turned out, and it gave me a ton of ideas. And for the record, no I don't like how everything I do turns out.

With nothing else to blah about this one, here's my Birds as High as Planes (Caged Mix) from June 2009.