Dierdre Remix Contest
Winner
1st Runner Up
2nd Runner Up
Firefly (McCannRmX) by Josh McCann - listen
3rd Runner Up
4th Runner Up
5th Runner Up
Prizes: Grand Prize Winner
A 20 CD pack (20 of the best CDs from Six Degrees).Release of their remix on a planned vinyl, CD single or Six Degrees compilation.
ACID Pro 5 software.
Five Standard Collection libraries from the Sony Sound Series Loops & Samples collection.
Prizes: Two Runners Up
A 5 CD pack (5 of the best CDs from Six Degrees).One Standard Collection library from the Sony Sound Series Loops & Samples collection.
About the Contest
ACIDPlanet.com is offering "Firefly" from world/electronic chanteuse Dierdre Dubois for remixing. Its mix of sultry vocals, driving beats and otherworldly effects are sure to get remixers lit up.About the Artist
After a decade of collaboration with the ambitious, far-reaching world music ensemble Ekova, "One" on the Six Degrees label marks Dierdre's emergence as a solo artist making her first creative statement. The album title also symbolizes her singular control over every aspect of the album.As a member of Ekova, Dierdre had come to worldwide renown for her imaginative, wordless vocal flights of fancy, set against music that combined old-world textures with new-world technology, bridging the gaps between ancient and modern, East and West. "After ten years of working in a band situation, we'd all grown in different directions," Dierdre says of Ekova's split. "We'd all been really focused on this one project for a long time, and we'd learned a lot from each other. But we'd all matured, and the time had come for each of us to try something new, something more personal."
Where her earlier songs were often born from a spark created with acoustic guitar or cello, on "One," Dierdre generated much of her material with sequences she developed on a computer. "I did a lot of the programming myself," she says, noting that the writing process itself was actually much the same. "It always starts as something very simple and minimal, with a lot of space. For me, that's the ideal situation for composing vocals."
Setting "One" still further apart from her previous work and making it even more personal, Dierdre also decided to emphasize songs with lyrics, in both English and French. "Firefly" exudes the terse, breathy sensuality of vintage Prince, while "Sweet and Sticky Perfume" bumps and rumbles under Dierdre's sly, seductive narration. On "A Maid in Love," she thoroughly recasts a traditional folk ballad as a dubby trance number.
Even with the appearance of lyrics on "One," Dierdre remains firmly committed to the fanciful free vocal flights her fans have come to love. "I want to be in music to make people feel good, relaxed or joyous, but I don't necessarily need to be telling them how to feel or what I think in order to do that," she explains, then adds with a laugh, "There are definitely enough people doing that to go around! I will probably keep writing lyrics, but I will also keep singing without them, because the abstract is a really interesting landscape to work on."
With her album completed, Dierdre is looking forward to taking her new music out on the road. Summing up her current state of mind, she adds, "I'm having a lot of fun, I'm meeting a lot of people. And it's like a kind of musical community-I'll do some vocals for you, you do a remix for me. It's about meeting people and sharing."
