Machine Drum - “Mergerz & Acquisitionz” - 2CD - M3rck Records (2006)
Machine Drum - Disa Bling (Loozas Deconstruction Remix)
M3rck Records released a 2CD-Set containing remixes of tracks originally done by Machine Drum, I am featured with a remix of his track “Disa Bling”.
It was quite a challenge to remix that track since his futuristic electro-hiphop does not really offer any melodic lines or chords that you can use to build a new track, so after a few tries I decided not to remix his song but rather remix his style of making music. The track contains some of his samples, rhythm and bassline and is basically built around a line of “fake scratches”. I popped a few records on my turntable and started scratching and pounding on my punch-in button, after a few minutes I had a wav file full of small scratch-snippets, I did cut them into pieces (using the wonderful waveknife-software) and then built a scratch-line using randomly chosen sample-snippets from that session.
I very much like that track and as I heard Machine Drum does too.
The track appears as “looza+chimerical child” on the final CD because that was the time that Pinicchio managed to conceal that he is a total prick, all he did was abit of mastering on the final result, his contribution to the track itself is nil.
The CD is sold out meanwhile, but you might have a chance to get it somewhere second-hand, it’s really a great package.
Check the Discogs-Page.
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VA - “Practice Avoiding Mistakes” - CD + 2LP - Tokyo Dawn Records (2003)
Looza - Known
The first physical release of Tokyo Dawn Records… Alot of sweat went into this one.
This record had been cooking for over two years until we were finally able to release it. The reason was mostly that we wanted a worldwide distribution and a proper deal for this baby, something that took quite some time to work out. After negotiating with different labels we got a great distribution deal in the end end, the thing was scheduled for production and release, then it took another four months because there were some problems with the CD-Production-Company. Finally the record was released, loads of very favourable reviews started to pour in, but somehow the sales didn’t really go off. In hindsight we just had bad luck and released that record at exactly the time when P2P really became a common practice, big websites and computer-magazines wrote articles explaining exactly how to download music from the internet, no one was buying anything anymore, ways of online-distribution (like beatport or iTunes) were not invented yet and the record-industry was really beginning to freak out. (A mistake we couldn’t really avoid.)
My track on this record is “Known” and to be honest it’s not really a good one. At the time I spent most of my time for Tokyo Dawn with A&R, Promotion and other organizational tasks. Also that was the time that my music was beginning to drift away from the style TDR was famous for and I often found myself producing music that would not really fit into the style of the label. But I had to be on that record, so I brushed up an old beat of mine, got some scratches from DJ Opossum and I had my contribution, but one that really falls flat compared to the other tracks. (A mistake I should have avoided.)
My (much) bigger contribution to this project was the layout, I got some very astonishing artwork from Bram Nelson and spent alot of time on the printdesign and the typography. Unfortunately printdesign was relatively new for me at that time (I had done mostly screendesign so far) and I didn’t really know what I was doing. (I learned from these mistakes and avoided them later). It was also alot of fun to insert hidden messages in the artwork. 
The record itself turned out to be a “slow burner”, it sold very steadily over the past years and alot of record-shops all over the world always have a few copies in stock simply because they know these copies will sell eventually. As far as I know there is a fourth pressing meanwhile and you can get it from almost anywhere, amazon definately has the CD and the Vinyl-Edition.
Check the Discogs-Page.
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Fräuleinwunder - “The Vinyl Variations” - 12″ - Universal Jazz (2003)
Fräuleinwunder - Nie Monoton (Loozas Lumbago Remix)
Basically a very unpleasant experience. “Fräuleinwunder” was a Sideproject of some members of Dephazz and I have to say that Dephazz is generally nothing I listen to, I don’t like those fake brazil-nujazz-beats. Prymer had made the contact to them and they wanted a Collectors-Remix-EP based on the original CD.
I had the feeling that they gave me the recordings that originally went into the trashcan, I got a load of rather unusable vocalrecordings (obviously all outtakes) aswell as one french-horn-line and spent the first days looking for usable vocal-portions and reassembling a proper vocaltrack. The original itself was quite boring, based on a F-Major/G-Major chord change through the entire song. After I had finished and uploaded the remix I never got any “thank you” email or a comment (let alone any money) and to top it all off I had to purchase my own copy from WOM.
Apart from that I had a heavy Lumbago (google ?) while doing that remix (hence the name) and should have stayed in bed instead.
The remix itself was re-produced from scratch, using some interesting techniques. For example the guitar you hear is a sampled loop in a totally different tempo that was pitchshifted to fit the chords and then chopped with a gater to get a rhythm. The Piano in the middle part is also some sampled loop that got pitchshifted around to fit to the track.
The record was released as a 500 pcs. limited edition and was sold out almost instantly, I am not sure if you can get it on ebay or somewhere else, but probably not.
Check the Discogs-Page.
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