One of the great things about working on Materia Collective arrangement albums is that there are plenty of opportunities to try something new in terms of genre or collaboration. Electronic Dance Music, commonly just called EDM, is not a style that I usually write in. So when this latest EDM project was proposed, I jumped on board.

Future Dance Land is an EDM themed arrangement album of music from the hit Nintendo 64 game Diddy Kong Racing. Because EDM contains a wide spectrum of genres and sub-genres, there was plenty of room on this album for a variety of stylistically different interpretations of David Wise’s score.

For Future Dance Land I covered the track “Boulder Canyon.” My original plan was to do a Trip-hop reinterpretation of the track, significantly slowing down the tempo to create something drastically different from the source material. However, during the writing process it became a more atmospheric downtempo remix, than anything that could be considered specifically Trip-Hop. It wasn’t what I set out to do originally, but I like how this arrangement came out in the end.

 

There are some wonderful arrangements on this album from a great group of remixers and artists. There’s also a ton of variety present, despite the album’s concept being limited to the EDM genre. You can check out the full Future Dance Land album on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Google Play.