SQL breaks down his remix of Sohn, Lights
Clarian, PBR Streetgang
Anjunadeep, 2017
Since exploding onto the techno scene in 2009 with his minimal monster Distorted Reality, Pim van Horssen has released on high-profile labels such as Pig&Dan’s Elevated and Secret Cinema’s Gem, including an album release on the latter in 2017. Pim’s highest profile track is his remix of Sohn’s Lights, which featured on Anjunadeep 09, and during ADE 2017 he was kind enough to invite FM into his warehouse studio to show us how it was created.
How did you first hear Lights?
“It was my girlfriend that played it to me. I hadn’t heard of the artist at all. We were just at home and she showed the track to me on Spotify, and told me ‘you should do a bootleg of this’, so that’s how I got the idea to do a remix. I just bought the track on iTunes and loaded it up in Ableton, and started jamming around on it.”
Did you have an idea for the direction you wanted to take?
“Yeah I did have an idea, I really wanted to have this kind of growling bassline. I wanted to make it more like a deep techno, dancefloor version of the original. Because the original is kind of dancefloor-ready, but it just misses some balls in terms of the bass and just the percussion, plus there was a bit in original where the vocals go a bit too overboard.”
When it crescendos at the end of the track?
“Yeah, I just thought that was a bit too over the top for me to be able to played in a club, I wanted to have it a bit more... tamed.”
Was it hard to license the track?
“No, actually I didn’t have to do anything! My manager was approached by Anjunadeep and asked me if I had a track for their compilation, and then we just sent them a couple of tracks. They heard the bootleg and liked it a lot, so they wanted us to send something similar. We sent some tracks but didn’t have anything
up that street, so they said ‘maybe we just try to release the bootleg’. I thought it probably wasn’t going to happen, but I think Anjunadeep approached Sohn who gave the okay to officially release it.”
It seems you’re very keen on creating all your sounds from scratch…
“Yeah for sure. I try to not use any samples at the moment because I have a lot of machines and I can pretty much generate any sound I want. So it’s also kind of like a challenge for me to try to be able to make every element myself. But still I find myself finding inspiration in bits and pieces that are simple. I find an inspiring sample or I make my own. That’s usually the basis of the track, and then what I build around it is always made with the machines, so I hardly ever use samples like kicks and loops.”
Was it tricky working with the full mix as opposed to stems?
“It’s definitely more difficult – for most of track you have the full drums in and a bassline, so I just tried to keep it as simple as possible by just using an EQ to cut off the low frequencies. The challenge was just to get it to fit right in with all the other elements without really being too obvious that it’s a bootleg, and also trying to make the arrangement interesting; that was a challenge with this one.”
“I try to not use any samples at the moment because I have a lot of machines and I can pretty much generate any sound I want. So it’s also kind of like a challenge for me to try to be able to make every element myself.”
How did you manage to keep it interesting?
“I just tried to take out the main theme and build on that instead of trying to keep the poppy structure. But still there’s a lot of different segments in the track – it switches to different melodies, so that kind of distracts you from what you were listening to before. I think this is always difficult for me when I’m doing originals: I have an idea and I evolve it over seven minutes, and then it gets boring! So actually that was easier with this, because I already had these poppy segments I could just chop in and out to make it more interesting.”
You seem to use a lot of saturation processing too.
“Working in the box you can get this really sterile sound, and I really like the gritty analogue feel. So that’s why I use a lot of saturation. It can do a lot of good, especially on high frequencies, where digital-sounding hi-hats can really pierce your ears. With saturation you can kind of smooth things out. I use a lot of saturation on kick drums just to glue everything together to make it sound like a whole instead of separate elements – it kind of glues it together and gives it some warmth, character and texture.”