Whether I would be obsessed with its immediate circumstances or whether I would try to put my life in a small capsule of words. Would I be grief or panic stricken? Cold or desperate for human contact? Would I try to laugh it off or be crushed by the weight of it all? Those questions are hinted at throughout the EP, but they had to be answered now.

At the end of our remix album The Sleep Station EP comes a song in which we imagine our hero, Colonel Eddie, is drifting in a space capsule – damned to die alone as Charlie moves out of radio range toward re-entry. The song is meant to be a dying transmission – Eddie knows these are the last words anyone will ever hear him speak, so he struggles to be heard over the interference.

The Promise You Made v3 is ugly, and purposefully so. Death is ugly and so is isolation. This cacophony of sound is meant not only to bring his physical state to the fore, but underscore the chaos of grand thought and depression that envelop Eddie as he loses contact with Charlie in an endless void.

It begins with a recollection of the run-up to launch – Diaries originally written by Dave Debiak for Hang In There Charlie. It ends by blending what I would have said at the moment of death with Charlie’s condition.

Mr. President, it is my greatest honor and privilege to be considered by you and your peers to have me take part in this mission. I humbly accept this opportunity to be a pilot in the project known as Flight One. I have trained for this for what feels like my whole life, I dreamed of this as a child… I have trained for this for what feels like my whole life, I dreamed of this as a child… ..we have arrived and every moment is spent working, there is little time for writing… In closing, Mr. President, I give you my word as an officer in the United States Air Force, be it in life or in death This mission will be accomplished.

The song itself is another one of these diaries, slowly fading in and our of Charlie’s range. Our hero is still disturbed by his decision to protest conditions in the secret space station – a decision that forced NASA to leave Charlie to die alone.

WE came the way of this burning faith

SHE saved my soul so I made the most

HE said these words, so in death he’ll learn his last verbs were a curse – his mind’s dead to be heard.

The only thing of which we dream is a vision of sleep/ We all flee from the deep which is dark and steep/ fall off when your knees buckle to your sleeves/ and if you know what we hope, then we’re one-in-the-hole/ throw a rope in the smoke, pull out all we know/ an empty cage for the rage that I feel for fate/ the promise we made – I’d honestly break and hate the snakes who smash grank and skank 20 bars of weight./

I will miss you. I remember you sitting on your porch swing waiting for me to kiss you. nothing else in this world mattered but you. Now I’m here and I’m missing everything you do. I was always taking from you and I’ve given nothing in return. … Floating here with no hope of returning, I try to fight it off but in my dreams I am missing my head, walking endlessly. There is no heaven, it is gone. And I’ll never see you again.

Hotter than a blue star – bonds red, cop cars?/ They smear we fear what comes what goes who flows, and who sold rap’s soul?/ Well I can buy it back from the city in black/ If I could take a stab, but my knife is a pad/ Hip-hop could make a run from fake gangsters, Guns? More likely to be wed in Elena’s bed/ You see, true poems float like Charlie’s hope/ When the anonymous are dead like the promise they shed/ I said we might reach the end, but love the present instead/ I said we might reach the end, but love the present instead.

So here it is, hope you enjoy!

The rest of this continuing series:
http://www.airandseabattle.com/2009/03/11/anatomy-of-a-remix-sleep-station-flight-1/

http://www.airandseabattle.com/2009/02/18/anatomy-of-a-remix-sleep-station-fallen/

When we began the process of remaking these Sleep Station songs, Flight One seemed too hard a nut for us to crack. Essentially, we started each track of the EP by taking snippets of acoustic guitar and the tempo from these Sleep Stations songs and branching them out into hip hop inspired tangents – both lyrically and sonically.

Thankfully, Gavin was able to do a smooth job of cutting apart the one area of the song we could add a credible beat to – the very beginning. With that small loop, Gav put in a sparse atmospheric beat along with tiny shreds of the rest of the song and looped it so I could get a sense of the tempo and downbeat I’d be writing for and start arranging a chorus.

The album Hang In There Charlie is about two astronauts in the mid 70′s on a secret mission who protest the conditions of the space station, and are subsequently left to die in space. Eventually, NASA relents and lets one pilot go home, the other must die alone.

I thought Flight One was about the end of the training process and launch of our experimental 1970s space astronauts. What the pilots seem to be saying is ‘what’s done is done, no more time for introspection, and if this immoral mission takes us to outer space, we may as well embrace being one of the few who will ever have that honor.’ “For 20 years we have gambled/ this time we have won.” Debiak sings, “are we too precious to think twice? too precious to think right?” But its too late for second guessing. “Now we’re okay/ the stars are my friends.” Here is the tangent I wrote for it.

It’s outer space man/ got me beggin for breaks man/ liftoff today man/ crash land like bam/ train till ya break – ex-army base/ ‘It ain’t safe’/ that kind of paper?/ ‘blast off, I’ll see ya later’/ Keep a secret from the Feds and from the Soviets/ I didn’t tell my best friends cause I know its a test/ If for the rest of my life I keep this curse inside/ to see the earth fly by?/ almost worth the time/

Flight One – Your dream man, outer space
Flight Two – Fuck a mission, do whatever it takes.                                                         Flight Three – Believe if you blink it’s gone, and If you ever wanna fly, baby sing this song.

We made it/ but conditions was cold and degraded/ souls of the faithless/ but how could I break it?/You know it’s wrong/ This is a prison – hate the merciless throng/ Toke the bong in the hall – is that relief for us all?/ It’s not enough for me/ ethically broke emcees might reject his plea/ but this place is diseased/ if you believe that he breathes/Pleased if he bleeds?/ Imma tell it to the world – How could ya stop this, G?

After some contentious arguments about rhyme patterns and pacing, per a good rapper – producer relationship, Gavin saw fit to hop on his keyboard and record the loops that define this remix. We knew this would be the first track, so from its introduction it had to tell you it was catchy, and that this is a long story. Hence the ambient, but subtly terrifying greeting welcome to outer space that kicks around in the opening seconds.

Helping give the song an understated majestic twinge is a little piece of the background atmospherics of the original song, which can be heard following each loop of Dave’s guitar (listen closely to the intro in Flight One) and additional synth work on our end by Gavin Werner.

Hope you enjoy, we called it Welcome to Outer Space: Flight Two

- Take a sparce, immaculately vocalized song, such as “Fallen” off of Sleep Station’s Hang in there Charlie.

- Read the album’s liner notes, figure out what the heck the song is about.

- Listen to the song over and over until you can hear the background atmospherics and evaporating strings of guitar extract in your sleep.

- Channel the story the original artist was trying to tell, adding what you imagine he left out for lack of space.

- Write this story in poem form. The poem must match the rhythms of the musical breaks:

So If I left you for the sky, space so dark that I might leave you for the cold – drift with the lost souls. My God, I’ve let you go, my heart so strong it never folds – If space is vast and now I’m trapped? Within these dreams, visions scream its Earthly things I long for – my wife’s touch, angels crush all my hopes, my only home, say it ain’t so, but I have fallen so low. Proclaim we’ve lost all our hope, Sunlight it blinds the mind, hit right between the eyes, somehow it won’t all be fine, somehow we won’t all be fine.

It’s these divine things – space is outta my dreams. Encompass everything I see – how could I ask you to leave? The streetlights make it blind, like the backs of my eyes. Is it the Sun on my mind or Man as Satellite? Destruction frees what I’d bleed all over the seams, my mind gleans what my dreams will live through he. Talk to my family if they’re sadly still swimming in grief, tell em I said stupid things so I’ll be dead in a week. Tell em space is as flat as a globe in a class, tell em man can fly fast but your souls are still trapped, tell em we was treated bad but the past is the past, tell em science moves back when we neglect the path.

- Find a remarkably slick, yet unpretentious producer

- Distort the track’s tempo to match your new vision, distort the singer’s voice to blend your visions.

- Record guitar loops, new synth tracks, etc. Throw most of them out. At least they taught you more about the song.

- Record vocals. Record vocals again. Have Gavin Werner yell at you, argue about pacing. Record Vocals again.

- Master once with a Mac.

- Master again on a PC.

Hope you like it.

02-oh-no