First some backstory (I know you want no backstory, you could care less, you want the song.). A couple of years ago me, J.C., and a good DJ friend of mine Amanda Michelle decided to start a band. We named this band Color of Night. The goal was to make old school cheese trance and the name kind of reflects that, the problem was, on reflection neither one of us really wanted to make old school cheese trance. Amanda was pushing me to make relevant minimalist stuff while I was pushing for a kind of over the top rocky-trancy amalgamation, needless to say, we didn’t finish the EP.

However, a few things did come out of these sessions. A couple of ideas from these sessions made it to Apparent Horizons (Specifically Requiem for a Savior Pt.1 and Color of Night) and a couple other of the song ideas are going to see the light of day in one form or another on a project I am working on right now with a very talented vocalist by the name of Laura Slade that will be released this year (not under SDO).  All that to say, we did finish one song–sort of.

I say sort of because it’s a remix.  In the summer of 2008 Amanda about pooped herself when she first heard Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and decided that we needed to remix it.  I wasn’t too stoked to remix a Coldplay song, but once I got into it, it proved a fun challenge.  Basically, I added a synth bassline, some synth pads, a huge organ, a huge guitar, a fake choir, some bells, some more strings and of course drums.  The reason why I added all of the musical elements was not only did it give the song a bit of a more bombastic feeling, but I needed to cover up all of the artifacts created when time stretching the song because there is drift in the original track.  You can still hear many of the artifacts, but over all, I think it sounds pretty good.  However, mixing those elements in with the original track and still maintain the feeling of the original is where it became challenging and frankly kind of fun.

We released the first version of this track in 2008 but we received feedback that the drum track we added was pretty vanilla.  In hindsight, it was so vanilla it bordered on opaque.  So, after these couple of years I decided to give another crack at the drums, because after all, who doesn’t want to hear ANOTHER remix of an already overplayed hit?  I added an element that I think Amanda may have shot down, but I put in some acoustic snare because I think it really adds energy to the track and breaks up the monotony, however, you don’t really hear that many acoustic snares in remixes, so that’s why I think she may have said no.  Oh well…

The MP3 is below, if you actually like it and want the full res version, hit me at contact@sdorchestra.com and I will send it.  My server is being a bit of a female dog with larger files, once that is fixed I will just post it there.

To listen to the song, merely click, to save, right click and ‘save as’ Viva la Vida CoN Life Mix. It’s a dance mix, so it’s long, it really starts kicking in about 90 seconds in.  I guess this formally closes the book on Color of Night.

The Color of Night