Droom

Droom was an excellent Canadian band formed in 2002 that I barely knew, and I had only heard their really cool song “While We Can” in a promo for A Different Drum, the label that released their first two singles as well as their first album at the time, 128 1/2 Days, which I heard great things about wherever I went.

But this time the opposite process happened to what had always happened up until then: they came to me because they had heard my remixes and wanted me to remix them. Which made me very happy, of course. It was the first time this had happened in my career and it would become the normal process from now on.

Graham first sent me the demo of their new song “Blood Culture”, which I loved from the first time I heard it, and soon after in October he sent me the vocals as well as several isolated parts of the song, which gave me more material so as not to lose the band’s original sound.

The biggest difficulty for me with this song was that a memory stick on my machine had burned out (I didn’t have the money to buy another one), and with only 128MB of RAM I couldn’t play the remix I was making, so I had to program in the dark, render it (a long and time-consuming process), listen to the WAV, memorize all the corrections, adjustments and additions and go back to programming. Then I had to render everything again to listen to it and this cycle repeated itself countless times, consuming a lot of time.

And when I had finally finished the song, my CD burner broke down, and nothing in this world could bring it back to life. But I still had a good old SCSI burner on my old machine, and I recorded it there and then to send it to Canada, after Graham’s approval after listening to the MP3, of course.

“hey! I like it alot. Very oldschool extended mix style. Awesome!”

Graham Jackson

Luckily the deadline wasn’t tight, and I managed to do everything well. My remix was ready at the end of 2003. It was my first adventure in FuturePop. It first came out on a Blood Culture promo CDR in a very limited number.

This song fell into my lap while my Quake friends and I were looking for a name for our Clan that was leaving the LAN for the Internet for the first time. And it fit like a glove for what we were looking for, and ended up naming our Clan, which a few years later would become Blood Culture Multigaming. And with the band’s approval, this song became our clan’s anthem, featured in several promotional videos.

When I was invited by Synthphony Records in 2004 to produce my Remix Album Synthphony REMIXed! Vol.2, and even more so with this work of mine that I liked so much without a proper release, it had to be part of my album. I’m glad that everything worked out, and it became a great strength of the album.

Although the album Ten Songs, which featured “Blood Culture”, was spectacular and the band’s best work to date, the band unfortunately disbanded after William left for family reasons. Graham continued on alone with the third and final album The Voice Of Ghosts, but without William‘s synths it became another band, despite its very high quality. I consider this third album more the first album of The Silence Industry, Graham‘s solo project, than a third Droomalbum. The Silence Industry is still active today with several incredible albums.

A curious fact is that I was the first and last remixer the band hired to remix them. All the previous ones were chosen by the record company where they had no say, and there were no more remixes after mine.