In yesterday’s post, we focused on recent news about Cameron Argon (a/k/a “Big Chocolate”), a dude that our bonded-in-blog bros over at Metal Sucks aptly called a “Renaissance Man.” What prompted our feature was Argon’s separation from Burning the Masses, a death-metal band with whom he’d recorded a forthcoming album and toured throughout Europe earlier this year. But at the tail-end of yesterday’s post, we also mentioned that in his “Big Chocolate” persona, he had remixed a Suicide Silence song called “Disengage”.
Century Media has released that remix, along with the original song, as a “single.” It’s available in two formats — as a digital download from iTunes and as a 7″ blue vinyl from CM Distro. Joshua Andrew Belanger created the cover art for the single, which you can see above.
Off and on yesterday, we listened to the original song and the remix back-to-back. The more we listened, the more we got into both versions of the song. The original Suicide Silence track shifts back and forth between a pulsing distorted riff and a dissonant, squealing guitar lead, and then up-shifts the tempo before crashing the pace down into a broken-down crawl. Following the breakdown, the tempo continues to shift back and forth, and throughout the song Mitch Lucker growls and shrieks mercilessly until the track finishes with 15 seconds of solitary drums.
In the remix, Big Chocolate has done more than separate and reshape the sounds present in the original. He’s applied a variety of electronic effects to distort and change the vocals and instrumentation, injected samples, added scratching and electro drums, messed with the rhythms so that they generate more of a dance-beat, and done a hundred other things that we’re not expert enough to figure out or describe.
The resulting music is drenched in wild sound effects, more aurally dense than the original, but still recognizably “Disengage” and still recognizably metal. I don’t listen to electro house or dubstep, but one of my collaborators (IntoTheDarkness) is getting into those genres and I’ve heard a few things he’s recommended. Snatches of the “Disengage” remix sound like those styles, but I really don’t think a genre name has yet been invented for the results of what Big Chocolate did with the Suicide Silence material. Anyone out there have a suggestion?
Ater the jump, you can listen to both songs back-to-back. And then after that, we’ve got a “mixtape” for you that was inspired by “Disengage”.
So, first up, here’s the original song — “Disengage”:
And now, here’s the Big Chocolate remix of “Disengage”:
Suicide Silence – Disengage (Big Chocolate Remix) from RaskMusic on Vimeo.
If you dig what Big Chocolate has done, there’s more of that good shit on the way. As we reported in yesterday’s post, he and Mitch Lucker are collaborating on a project code-named “Commissioner” (a/k/a “Camitchior”), in which they’re creating not remixes, but original songs with a vibe similar to the “Disengage” remix. More details about that project can be found on the Big Chocolate blog at this location.
Big C is also remixing songs from one of his other projects, Disfiguring the Goddess. One of those remixes is now available for streaming on the Big Chocolate Facebook page. If you go there, check for the music player on the left side of the page and look for the remix of a DTG song called “Uprising”. As Big C might say, it’s miiiiint.
SATURDAY MIXTAPE:
So, at some point last night, after enjoying a few margaritas out on the town, I used the “Genius” feature on my iPod to generate a playlist off the song “Disengage”. I don’t use that Genius feature very much, but this time what it served up was a delicious dish of deathcore-y goodness. I thought of things I could change to make the mix even better — but I’m too lazy to follow through on those ideas. So, for your streaming enjoyment, here’s the first unaltered handful of songs generated by that Genius algorithm (probably should be called “algorhythm”). Hope you like it as much as I did while in a tequila-induced haze. Enjoy your Saturday.