In June, I entered a remix competition for Chelsea Jade’s Night Swimmer. Thanks to Red Bull and The Rockshop, I got a chance to play with the tune that first interested me in Chelsea Jade’s gorgeous dream pop.

I didn’t do her tune justice but it rekindled an interest in something I’ve dabbled with since I was in my teens—noodling around with computer music.

I bought a Casio CZ-1000 in the eighties and had dreams of controlling it from my computer. I forked out for a Roland MIDI interface but could neither afford the software nor enough computing power to do it justice. (We’re talking 12MHz AT computers with four megs of RAM in those days!)

I still have the CZ-1000 and have dusted it off. (Now to write a patch editor and manager…)

Over the weekend I had another go at messing with someone else’s tune. I’d found The Wired CD, which was published in 2004 (Wired 12.11) to promote the Creative Commons. I took DJ Dolores’ remix of Gilberto Gil’s Oslodum and extracted the beats and some melodic info into MIDI and then reworked it as an electronic track that really bares scant resemblance to the original. It’s naive and unsophisticated but it was fun to do. Have a listen.