This is a piece from the upcoming film Armalion. With Nico Mendrek’s permission it featured in an insert on Afro Cafe on SABC2 last week (I’ll try and upload that video soon), so I’m sure he doesn’t mind if I post it here.

In this scene, our heroes are set upon by a giant dragon summoned from the abyss. Obviously they have to fight it. It eats most of the nameless support cast before being vanquished by a spellcasting witch who turns it on the evil villain. All in all, a fun scene.

I like it because I got to make use of big choirs singing faux-latin (lyrics concocted by my friend Jacques van Heerden) when the beast appears. This is, of course, all done in software, using a library called Voices of the Apocalypse, and its associated VOTA utility that lets you type in syllable by syllable the words you’d like the choir to sing.

East West have since replaced and updated this with a product called Symphonic Choirs which, while being marvellously versatile, does not, in my opinion, sound anything like as good despite drawing on a 35GB library of 24-bit samples.

Also I got to do some nifty sound design during the spellcasting bit, which is made up of choir dischord clusters, reversed recordings of people talking, and the sound a plastic pipe makes when you drown it in reverb. I love my job.

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This is a mix that Terry and I did, under the our 3Headz moniker. The vocals and lyrics are by a singer from Durban called Aylos - I think she’s going places. This mix will appear on the new album from DJ Guffy (for the umlungu, this is inexplicably pronounced “Goofy”, just like the Disney character).

Aylos has a solo album coming out soon which will feature the original version of this song.

Enjoy the mix:

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This is a club remix I did for up-and-coming Johannesburg artist Zos, whose album is into the final stretch of being mixed here in Studio 1 at SSI. The album version is more hip hop, a bit slower and has more words. And more pianos.

Obviously it’s unashamedly a party track. The original features some guest vocals by MXO that seem to have got lost somewhere, I guess I’ll check under the couch cushions and see if I can find them.

The rest of the album is nothing like this one, and there are some smoking hot beats on it, which I hope to post as we get closer to completion.

This is my full length DJ remix, hence the long build.

Update: Goggi took a copy of this remix down to YFM, and DJ Chilli M is now rocking it on the drive time show.

Listen:

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