wa conner — remixes and reflections

We’ve all heard the cliche many times: life is full of surprises. This was never more true for us than during our experience that eventually led us to remix both versions of the track “After the Ball” and “Its Too Late” for Minefield in 2003.

When we finished recording The Electric Haze in 2001, I had decided that I would make the album available online rather than follow the traditional music label route that many bands were still clamoring for, which was to get an A & R guy from a label to notice your band and sell their music label on offering you a deal. Raven and I both knew from experiences of friends and family who had worked in the music industry that this was really not the best way to put out an album, particularly an album that was likely to fit into such a small niche of music. So we explored online, and eventually we settled on mp3.com and CDbaby.

Mp3.com had this wonderful music community. Even cooler, they offered on-demand distribution, which would allow you to upload your songs and artwork, and they would manage the dirty details of manufacturing the CDs. In 2001 this was a novel idea that was only really beginning to pick up steam. Prior to that, it was nearly impossible for a musician (or an author for that matter) to have short runs (of fewer than 3,000 or more copies) of your work produced. Now, its just a matter of burning your own discs and/or uploading your music to any number of social networks, peer to peer, and musical services who make distribution much easier.

While mp3.com handled manufacturing, they weren’t that great at selling the music of independent artists. We had heard that there was this new site around called CDBaby. The buzz among musicians was that this venture, created and operated by Derek Sivers in Portland, Oregon was really the next best way to have your CD online after CDnow and Amazon.com.

We setup an account and sent them a batch of CDs to stock in their warehouse. When someone purchased our album from their site, they would go ahead and ship it out themselves and then credit our account with the sale, rather than wait for us to fill the order, as Amazon.com did at the time.

Unbeknown to us, when our albums arrived at CDBaby, they were met and handled by a volunteer named Jett Black (not the porn star, BTW). He was passionately involved in the Portland, Oregon underground gothic, electronic, and punk scene. Jett was taken with our sound and went about trying to contact us via email and phone. Initially we didn’t know what to make of his highly complimentary emails. One reason for our suspicion with Jett had to do with experiences we had heard about fromother musicians who were encouraged to send their albums to retailers in foreign countries, only to discover that the recipients were not legitimate resellers, but rather enterprising pirates who used the albums as masters for which to rip their master tracks for illegal sale in their own country. Eventually I spoke in person with Jett by phone and realized that his motives were quite innocent. Anyone who has met Jett, will tell you that he is one of the friendlies people you’ll ever meet. Jett was big on introducing artists to one another, and before we knew it we had been invited to a dinner at the Kennedy School that featured a bunch of people from the goth scene. Steven Holiday, publisher of Gothic Beauty was there, as well as Portland and Seattle bands Written In Ashes, Abney Park, The Sins, and Haunted House.

One of the perks at these dinners were the goodie bags that Jett and his wife Sonya would assemble. In each goodie bag were tons of stickers, free CDs, usb keys, marketing materials, and show flyers for everyone involved in the Portland and Seattle music scene, as well as a few other bands that were well known across the U.S. (The Strand, Razed in Black, and The Cruxshadows were among those). In our goodie bag was “After the Ball” , a debut EP album by a budding young artist, Tamara Kent, who hailed from Canada.

About a year later, Jett, who had heard our Depeche Mode and Madonna remixes, informed us that he had recommended our services to Tamara, who really wanted to hear what other people could create with her material. We accepted, and before we knew it we’d received these very nice and organized discs that contained all of the master tracks from the After the Ball EP (what people in the industry call stems).

The remixes were due in short order, so Raven and I broke up the work among us. She took on “After the Ball” and I ended up with “Its Too Late”.

I hoped with my version to capture the frustration, despair, and the resignation of the character in the song with the distorted vocals, and the vamping bass line was to symbolize the painful yearning heartbeat of a lost relationship.

Dead Poets Society

Minefield - "Its Too Late (dead poets society)"

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