So it’s no mystery now that we are putting the original catalog from Jocelyn Enriquez up on iTunes. While going through the songs, I ran across the old “Uncle Fred’s Orient Express” remix of Big Love, and remembered how much I really liked the mix. And hated it, too.
Uncle Fred was, of course, dance music industry pioneer Fred Held. Around Classified, we called him Uncle Fred because he was one of many mentors to us. One day, Fred told me that he had an idea for a remix involving trains and train sounds, then asked if I could do that. Who was I to say otherwise? Around the same time, I had also planned to do an Erasure styled remix. To those who know Erasure well, that put me in a “black box” of no samples, all synth generated sounds, and no chords. Any harmony had to be temporal, melodic, not static. This seemed like a good fit, besides the sampled train sounds, and the concept was born.