Swoon August 7th, 2009

Silversun Pickups – Panic Switch – Bobby Evans Remix

I’ve been waiting a sec for Dangerbird to release this jam but perfect timing on their parts since Silversun Pickups have just hit #1 on the Billboard rock charts. It’s actually the first time in 11 years that an independent artist has done that. Congrats to the band, the label, and producer Dave Cooley.

“Bobby Evans has taken the reigns at remixing the chart-topper, using industrial touches and heavily thumping drums…more rocker than rave-hit and not for the faint of heart.” – Filter Magazine

I started this remix only knowing that I wanted to keep the entire vocal. In most cases I strip a track down to its most minimal structure then slowly build from there but once I pulled out the guitars and drums the vocal just wouldn’t sit right in anything else, it seemed overly soothing and lost the force that the original had. I was laying in bed one night and realized a minimal approach was all wrong, it needed to be full and loud, overly aggressive and distorted.

I went back to the studio and started re-compressing all of the guitar and drum stems, pushing them to distort, record them, then push them back out to the compressor again and EQing through the board as they came back. After that I sent the drums back out through a transient designer to bring even more of their characteristics to the front making them very loud, full and distorted. I wanted them to take up as much room as possible. From there I broke the tracks down to their most basic parts and notes, keeping the original song structure but not the structure of the songs parts. I went through cutting and repeating bass notes and drum hits, removing the melody from the verses, and made the track build to a wide open chorus only to then fall apart to feedback and near slience. In the end I added no extra instruments to the original, its all distortion, feedback, and editing. Enjoy.

*ctrl click > download linked file