Every year since 1998, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has handed out a Grammy Award for the Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical.
It’s a clunky title, especially since the practice — taking music that was previously composed or recorded and making something new out of it — was hugely popular with classical audiences in the mid-19th century and beyond, when composers like Liszt and Busoni repurposed opera tunes into virtuosic paraphrases and fantasies.
But the award recognizes remixers as artists, even though they trade in pre-existing material, and that’s good. Early on, only the winners’ names — Frankie Knuckles, David Morales, Club 69 and Hex Hector — were acknowledged (not the titles of the remixes or their source material). None of those producers became household names, but since 2010, EDM super-producers like David Guetta, Skrillex and Cedric Gervais have dominated the category. (Deadmaus, who hasn’t won, was nominated in 2009 and 2012.)
At this year’s Grammy pre-telecast ceremony, held at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, Feb. 8, one of the contenders will be Audien — Nate Rathbun, 23, from Mystic — a producer whose remix of British rock band Bastille’s “Pompeii” was nominated in the category.
Last year, Billboard reported, Rathbun’s remix was the most played track at Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella. It now has nearly five million views on YouTube. “It was random,” Rathbun said. “That one, when I finished it, was just another track for me. But when it came out, I really started appreciating it… Apparently people like it.”
Rathbun maintained enough of the original music — key, tempo, groove, singer Dan Smith’s vocal melody and lyrics — to make it recognizable, but essentially his version is a new piece of music, with altered chord progressions, counter-melodies, differently shaded instrumentation and a new overall structure, one that owes to the rising builds, transitions and drops of EDM.
“In dance music, it’s common, when doing a remix, to take parts of the original that are in the background and putting them in the forefront,” Rathbun said. “Sometimes I’ll take the melodies from the original and work on them… But I like to keep it original when I remix.”
At a young age, Rathbun listened to hip-hop, then transitioned to fast, belligerent hardcore dance music from the U.K., with tempos pushing 170 beats per minute. Eight years ago, he started producing with a friend. “We started to release some of the music we were making on our own label,” he said. “It was fun. It was my foot in the door. I gradually moved down to progressive house and trance and started having my real releases on real labels.”
Rathbun simply released his “Pompeii” remix on Soundcloud and watched it go viral. He first heard about the Grammy nod while riding the train from Boston to Philadelphia, during his first headlining tour. Out of nowhere, his Twitter feed started to combust. “I had a feeling it could have gotten a nomination, but I didn’t want to think that because I might jinx it or something,” he said. “But I thought about how much airplay it got over the summer. It was overwhelming. It became my biggest track, and it’s just a remix. I thought maybe that could happen.”
Capping his breakout year, Rathbun recently signed to Astralwerks, a major-label subsidiary of Capitol Records. “It’s a good relationship, and it’s good to have those kinds of resources to make my music a little bit bigger. It gives me opportunities to work with fantastic vocalists. It’s good all around, but the main thing is the people and how much I like working with them. It’s like signing with your friends, basically. They’re really cool. They give you creative freedom.”
Despite the success of his remix, Rathbun still prefers creating original music.
“I don’t want to be seen as just a remix artist,” Rathbun said. “I have a lot of original music that’s done about as good as my remixes, so I want to be an original artist. I take originals more seriously, but I put my all into all my projects.”
THE 57TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS will be broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. on CBS. Information: grammy.com.
