
Club Weld – Remix The House LP
This is the second of two posts about my involvement with the Sydney Opera House ‘Remix The House’ project, spanning 2015-17.
In 2017, Club Weld held a residency at the music studios at the Opera House. This tied in once again to the ‘Remix The House’ concept of recording and sampling the SOH spaces themselves. I returned as a creative mentor, which involved general feedback and technical insights on music-making for interested CW members with electronic elements in their work, as well as accompanying the Club Weld musicians on another field recording tour of the House and providing a brief tutorial on how the field recordings could potentially become part of the music that they were composing during their sessions.
One of the musicians I ended up working with was the talented pianist Jonathan Yung. Together we made a new arrangement of his original composition ‘The World in the Future.’ We used some of the Club Weld field recordings for atmospheric textures appropriate for the sci-fi mood of the piece, plus samples from the past two years’ Remix the House sample packs for electronic drum programming. This piece was released along with 5 other tracks created by Club Weld members over the residency. Rainbow Chan and George Nicholas also worked as mentors during the sessions and provided both live and production contributions on a couple of the other tracks.
The Club Weld ‘Remix the House’ album was recently released on vinyl and can be ordered directly on Bandcamp. Check out the really stunning cover design by Sukit at the header of this post.
The ABC covered the project for a news segment online – there’s an excellent article as well as a short bit of video about Club Weld and the Remix the House project – check it out here. I made some brief remarks explaining the field recording and ‘remix’ aspect.
Thank you to the Sydney Opera House, Vivid, Information + Cultural Exchange and most of all to the members of Club Weld themselves for their amazing work on this unique record. It was a pleasure to contribute to this project and to be able to share my knowledge about field recording and sample creation. It’s so great that the ‘Remix the House’ concept continues to thrive and work its way into more and more new music – it’s a great example of the creativity afforded by sampling and the tools we all have at our disposal with contemporary software.