ReMix:Final Fantasy IV "Rainbow Forms" 4:12

It's been a bit! We've been lining up our respective ducks & prepping for our next album release and goodness, we seem to have lost track of time. Back to the queue, we've got ReMix #20 for Michael Hudak, who continues his experimental/spliced piano work with this lovely, atmospheric, & glitched take on the classic FF "Prelude":

"Never even played FFIV, but I know the "Prelude" melody atop the arpeggios first appeared in that game (I first heard it in FFVII), so I consider this a FFIV ReMix.

The Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto version of Brian Eno's "By This River" was the primary inspiration behind my methodology here; I wanted to take the sustained chords of the "Prelude" and cut them into slivers before gluing them back together in the same order, just with temporal gaps in the sustained note information and pure sine sub bass underneath. I tried playing the original chords underneath these slivers as well, but I couldn't de-clutter it enough mix-wise to pull it off, so the whole middle section of the song is just those slivers with (many) various shimmer and delay sends creeping in and out. I've done this before in several other of my mixes (maybe "Run" or "Bluesuperstructure" are the most digestible), but never have I relied on delays to carry the arrangement so far. I think it works, though. "The Prelude" is a beautiful piece of music and it's tough to mess it up.

There are also a lot of field recordings here that I wanted to sound "raw", and not cinematic or processed. Just reality as I heard it, within the confines of what midrange frequency space I could spare (most of them were recorded with a phone anyhow). As for the piano slivers, I really wanted that sparkle and reverb once the higher notes appeared. There's a noise gate set to the reverb so that the verb kicks in when the piano reaches higher frequencies. The highest notes were sounding a little harsh at first, though, because the verb tail was pretty long and those particular frequencies were building up and bouncing around inside of it, so I finally went and splurged on Soothe2 by Oeksound to help with that.

Source breakdown:

• 0:00-0:50 is a run through the "Prelude" chords - C/A/C/A/F/G/Ab/Bb - and aforementioned chopped up FFIV top melody.
• 1:00-2:10 is C to A repeating 3 times, then the rest of the chords, but only a partial ascent & descent of the arpeggios.
• 2:11-3:15 is the "Prelude" arpeggios note for note, essentially.
• 3:16-4:12 is back to C to A repeating (not strictly C major and A major; there are some small chord variations) until the final fade-out.

Thanks much, as always."

Fans of the artists' previous mixes in this style/aesthetic will certainly dig this; interesting about the noise gate triggering reverb, because I would have assumed it was just straight-up manual modulation envelope stuff. Gives me some ideas! It's the prelude, so you're looking at rise-fall arpeggios, and there's not much melodic/harmonic interpretation to speak of, so the arrangement is largely in the sound design realm... but it works for me: maintains the purity & simplicity of the source while transporting into a pianoscape of width, depth, and the now-familiar unfamiliarity of manipulated piano bits that Hudak employs. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more regular mixes & our upcoming Mode 7 jazz tribute to the SNES!