The more I go through the exercise of constructing these podcasts the more quickly I start to feel a theme emerge from the songs I'm presented with. I don't know if my week naturally shapes which songs I'm drawn to or if I'm getting more adept at recognizing patterns and capitalizing on them. This week the unifying theme was the image of a sprawling, dirty, neon-lit city at night (much like Midgar from Final Fantasy 7). The challenges this week were more technical than conceptual, wrestling with tempo changes and the like. My biggest quandary was whether or not to leave Discopolis and the intro to Alpha in, or just straight cut into Alpha near the lyrics. While I recognized that the smart producer decision would be to make the cut, I ultimately serve myself first and foremost with the podcast. To that end, Discopolis felt like it belonged with this week's theme, that it would be a song I'd associate with this week that I'd want to come back and hear later. As such, it got a stay of execution.
The three keystone songs this week were Eclipse, Shanghai, and Cherry Blossoms. Eclipse helped musically set the tone of the dirty city with its dirty beats, and I quickly found the dirty sound a recurring element of the other progressive house songs I was finding for the front part of the podcast. Shanghai is the song that initially jumped out at me and defined the theme of Midgar; it is conceptually and literally the heart of the podcast this week. Cherry Blossoms is the song I was most looking forward to hearing in full this week, the one I'm still the most anxious to keep listening to, and the heart of the trance back half of the cast; all the other songs feel like they are just there to hold up and support that song, in my mind at least.
Also, at some point in the process the master project name became that of a particular two-song mix I had worked on, Kung Fu and Apocalypse; I just left that as the working title. :-P Until next week, cheers!
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