Universal Music Japan has announced that they will be including a remix track by livetune on well-known electronic dance music producer Zedd’s upcoming Japanese release of the album Clarity. Zedd has previously made many remixes of his own and had also written songs for Skrillex, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga; he’s also producing her upcoming album. The “Spectrum” remix, whose preview was uploaded on YouTube, features heavily auto-tuned vocals sung by Miku’s English voice bankalong with some of the backing vocals from the original song. According to Twitter posts, CircusP worked on the tuning for the track. The track will be a bonus track for the Japanese release of the album Clarity; the album had also been previously released in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, garnering number 3 on the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart. Zedd had also run a remix contest for the album, which had previously received many entries from electronic artists in Japan as well.
According to the news release on UMJ’s official Zedd website, livetune had originally proclaimed himself a fan of Zedd on Twitter, and this reached the ears of record company staff in Japan. They proposed the idea of a remix to livetune, and when Zedd was ecstatic with the finished result and immediately decided to include that track on the Japanese Clarity release.
Zedd commented that it was quite exciting to listen to the remix and that he was quite surprised by the fact that it only took two days for the finished remix to be sitting on his computer. He said it was truly the work of a professional. What made him excited over this remix was hard to put to words, according to Zedd; it was like a Japanese person singing English and listening to a remix like this was something that he had never listened to before. Furthermore, “Spectrum” wasn’t a very simple song, audio-wise. Zedd thought it was quite easy to mess up a remix, with the melody and the background vocals clashing, etc. However, he felt that despite the fact that livetune changed some of the chord structure around, it was the only remix that fit the melody. Therefore, he was really into the remix and thought it was awesome.
According to livetune, there are many dance music producers out there, but Zedd was one of the very few artists he knew who had such a knack for beautiful melodies, and thus that is why he is a big fan. “Shave It Up” pumped him up, “Spectrum” made him quiver and “Clarity” brought tears to his eyes. Thus, being able to make a remix made him so happy that he was at a loss for words; he really enjoyed every minute of working on the remix and was gracious for everything that made it possible.
Note: The original upload of the preview was made private; the current link in the article refers to a new upload, which removed the backing vocals taken from the original version of Spectrum.