We put this together for our recent “A Night From Concentrate” mix but it didn’t end up making the cut. It combines the Canblaster & Berou remix of Nguzunguzu’s “Got U” with CeCe Peniston’s 90’s house classic “Finally”.

Surviving The Golden Age.com, a great site and a long time supporter of ours, approached us about doing a mix and an interview for them a few months back. We chipped away at it over time and finally delivered it last week. We described the mix during the interview like this:

“We wanted to try to distill the arc of a night into a 30 minute mix using songs from different genres and eras. We often try to do more than just quietly mix one record into another so the mix also includes a lot of new blends and many of the transitions add extra layers, samples or call backs to the previous track. A number of times on this mix we literally create a dialogue of sorts between the two tracks we’re mixing, which is something we like to do whenever possible.”

Check the original post here
Download link available here

Tracklist:

Bill Withers/LCD Soundsystem “Dance Yrself Lovely (Its Overture Bootleg)”
Nubian Crackers “Clap 2 Da (Remix)”
Poolside “Do You Believe?”
The Weeknd “House Of Balloons (Nadastrom Edit)”
Ohio Players “Ecstasy (DJ Melo & Jon Kwest Remix)”
Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson “Miscommunicaton”
Chilly Gonzales “You Can Dance (Edwin Van Cleef Remix)”
Queen & David Bowie/Daft Punk “Voyage Under (Its Overture Bootleg)”
Mylo “Drop The Pressure”
Pleasurekraft “Tarantula”
2 In A Room “Wiggle It”
Treasure Fingers “Your Love”
Switch featuring Andrea Martin “I Still Love You (Original & Heavyfeet Remix)”
Heavy D/Afrojack “Take Over Love (Its Overture Bootleg)”
Jomanda/Sammy Bananas/Fedde Le Grand “Save Me (Its Overture Bootleg)”
The Rapture/Fake Blood “Medieval Love (Its Overture Bootleg)”

And here’s the interview in full:

What are some of your earliest musical influences?

RiVerse: My first musical obsession was Hall & Oates around the age of 4. Hip hop kind of ran my life all through my teens and still works as the foundation for everything I do.
Macabee: My first cassette was Alvin and the Chipmunks singing Michael Jackson‘s greatest hits. The Beatles were also a big early influence. After that, I started listening to a lot of hip hop and house.

How did you get into DJing?

RiVerse: Being into hip hop as both a fan and in a creative aspect, it naturally evolved into DJing. So it started with listening to everything I could get my hands on, then that turned into making pause tapes and eventually I ended up buying a cheap pair of turntables from the back of The Source. Around that time the independent hip hop scene was really blowing up as well and a lot of the music was being put out strictly on vinyl. So necessity played a role as well.

Macabee: I played guitar in an incredibly fun band in high school, which was forced to split once we all graduated and moved to the four corners of the earth. I quickly got into production on the MPC, and soon after that I started DJing, as a way to be a one man band and keep churning out music. In a way I was DJing since I was young though; making mixtapes on a dual-deck boombox using my huge collection of cassingles.

What equipment/programs do you use to create music?

RiVerse: We DJ with Serato. For production, we both started out on the MPC-2000XL but almost everything we do now is on Ableton Live.

In a place like NYC where there is an overabundance of DJs, how do you think Its Overture stands out?

RiVerse: It’s definitely a crowded marketplace but whenever we spin, our goal is always to play to the crowd while still essentially doing “us.”

Macabee: I think our meticulous track selection is one of the main ways we set ourselves apart from most other DJs. We definitely pride ourselves on relentlessly dropping jam after timeless jam and never wasting a moment with “filler”.

What are some of your favorite records to spin during DJ sets?

RiVerse: That’s a difficult one to answer because it depends largely on what type of crowd we’re playing to. Every genre/crowd offers us the opportunity to play some things we love, either because we know they’ll kill or because we love sneaking in things people might not know.

You created an exclusive mix for StGA, can you describe a little bit about the concept behind it and some of the song selections?

Macabee: We wanted to try to distill the arc of a night into a 30 minute mix using songs from different genres and eras. We often try to do more than just quietly mix one record into another so the mix also includes a lot of new blends and many of the transitions add extra layers, samples or call backs to the previous track. A number of times on this mix we literally create a dialogue of sorts between the two tracks we’re mixing, which is something we like to do whenever possible.

RiVerse: While not an all out “cut and paste” mix, we’ve always been drawn to a more manipulative style of DJing……when it’s done well, of course. As we both said earlier, hip hop informs much of our aesthetic and a lot of that comes out in our penchant for flipping samples, both in our tracks and mixes. So we always try to incorporate that into whatever we do whether it’s through blends, content-conscious mixes, etc because we feel like we don’t hear a lot of that style anymore. Because while the whole age of the “mash up” did some good things for bringing an all-bets-are-off approach to sampling, it also created a stigma because a lot of it was (and still is) done badly: out of key, off beat, incoherent, crunk-acapella-over-indy-jam-of-the-week kind of things. So we’re trying to bring it back to a place that’s more reputable. More Prince Paul than Girl Talk.

What is next for Its Overture?

We’re going to keep releasing remixes and blends/mash ups every couple of weeks and we’ve got another volume of our Classic Rap mix that we’re working on that we’re really excited about. We also have plans for a real all genre, all style, cut-and-paste mix that will hopefully do justice to what we think DJing and sample-heavy production can be.

Aside from that, we plan to keep putting things out that continue to establish our range. Our love for all types of music enable us to move between genres and styles pretty naturally so we want to continue to build on that. We’ve done reworks of everyone from Phish and Grateful Dead to Company Flow (as a Drum-N-Bass remix, no less) and Sister Nancy. Cut Copy and Modular Records gave us props for our edit of “Sun God”, a lot of old school hip hop blogs showed love for our Classic Rap mix and most of our club-friendly remixes and bootlegs continue to get us attention. So we’re proud of that range and want to keep trying to bring a universal standard of quality to everything we do.

This track (also intended as a 2011 time capsule like our last release) pays tribute to the late Heavy D by combining his hip-house classic “Now That We Found Love” with Afrojack’s “Take Over Control”. The result works in both content and melody and hopefully breathes new life into two iconic songs from different eras.

Culture Bully asked us to contribute to their annual “Mashed” mix for 2011, which aims to be a mashup time capsule of sorts, so we submitted two tracks and “Medieval Love” made the cut (we’ll be releasing the other one next).  It takes the acapella and some other elements from The Rapture’s “How Deep Is Your Love” and combines it with Fake Blood’s “Medieval”.   The two songs share a similar melody so when the stems for “How Deep Is Your Love” were released, we seized the opportunity for a slightly more involved blend.

Medieval Love (Its Overture Bootleg) by Its Overture

And to check out Culture Bully’s full “2011 Mashed Mix” go HERE

For those that may have missed some (or all) of these when they first dropped, as the title says, this EP compiles 4 tracks where we either remixed or reworked some of the bigger rap songs from the past year or so.

RAP REMIX EP (Mediafire Link)

1. Dark Fantasy (Its Overture Remix) - Kanye West

2. I’m On One (Its Overture Remix) - DJ Khaled & Drake

3. Ni**as In Paris (Its Overture Remix) - Jay-Z & Kanye West

4. You Be Killin Em (Its Overture’s Tempo Murderer Edit) - Fabolous

While not quite a remix, we tried to take this track a few steps beyond what you would expect from a blend/mashup these days. We figured that if you’re going to mess with Etta James’ iconic “At Last”, you better make it worthwhile. So we chopped up her vocals all types of ways, progressing from the straightforward to the insane (check around the 3 minute mark for evidence). Using Quentin Harris’ epic “Let’s Be Young” as a backdrop, these two classics combine to create the type of soulful dance music we love most.

Young At Last (Its Overture Bootleg) by Its Overture

We stumbled across this one while working on an upcoming mix. It pairs Nelly Furtado’s Timbaland-assisted “Say It Right” acapella with an instrumental edit we did of Midnight Magic’s modern day classic “Beam Me Up (Jacques Renault Remix)”.

Beam It Right (Its Overture Blend) by Its Overture

It only took a few listens to recognize that Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You” is a masterpiece. After having it on repeat for about a week, I also decided that any attempt to remix it was not only futile, but pure blasphemy. Had I even been willing to consider it, the idea of combining it with one of the more popular big room house songs of the past few years (Swedish House Mafia’s “One”) would have been the furthest thing from my mind. And yet, here we are, presenting you with just that.

We actually dismissed it as soon as we put it together, but over time, we found it every bit as addicting as the original. We steadily build the track up from its slow ballad roots to the all out intensity of its Swedish House Mafia counterpart. So give it a listen (or two, as it seems to grow on every one we play it for) and let us know if we committed a crime against musical perfection or gave you a new way and another reason to listen to one of Mr. Ocean’s best.

Thinking About You (Its Overture’s One Mix) by Its Overture

A little over a month after its release, the long awaited Watch The Throne has been digested and debated by many and no matter where you’re opinion lies, it’s been a dominant conversation piece in hip hop. Given everyone’s familiarity, we felt it was an ideal time to rework one of its standout tracks, “Ni**as In Paris”. The melody is undeniably addictive and, in our minds, it was screaming to be flipped. So we chopped and rearranged it, switched up the tempo and added flavoring from a couple other punch-you-in-the-face-type-intense hip hop classics (”Ante Up” and “Get Your Freak On”, to be precise).

Ni**as In Paris (Its Overture Remix) by Its Overture

Figured we’d better drop this before “Watch The Throne” leaks and gobbles up all Jay-Z-related discussions. It’s a simple little blend, perfect for warming up a party and inspired by the similar bass lines in Michael Jackson’s “Liberian Girl” and Jay-Z & Jermaine Dupri’s Steve Arrington-sampling “Money Ain’t A Thang”. Say what you will about “The Throne” (Jay & Kanye’s new moniker) but Kanye certainly makes a better rapping partner than Jermaine ever did…..which is why we cut his verse out altogether on here. Enjoy!

Liberian Money (Its Overture Blend) by Its Overture