Halfway into October, we received an e-mail from VJ & Lighting Team Vision Impossible. Commissioned to design and operate the show for the upcoming Techmission Festival, a Melodic Techno Show in Prague, they asked us to collaborate on a new concept.
The briefing: create 7 epic DJ opener tracks empowered by the sound of Techno.
Intrigued by this concept, we got to work.
Hardstyle and EDM shows are often accompanied by epic, trailer-like opening shows with lots of lasers, incredible light shows, and lots of fireworks. For a Techno festival, however, this concept was unheard of.
Techno in itself is a pretty minimal music genre, with slowly evolving buildups and driving rhythms. Our challenge was to mold the minimal sound of Techno into an epic trailer-like soundtrack that could serve as the basis for the light show.
Vision impossible had a clear picture of what they wanted each track to sound like, and they provided us with a brief script that we could turn into a musical arrangement pretty quickly. Working without visuals, however, required close collaboration with Vision Impossible and numerous iterations which slowly evolved into a strong foundation.
Another challenge we faced was that each track was initially planned to be around 2.5 minutes in length. Keeping the tracks, which were essentially one big buildup, interesting for that amount of time required some creative solutions. We eventually decided to incorporate multiple buildups and constantly added ear candy to keep the tracks moving and building toward a final climax.
After the fact, we created an intro & outro for each track and added in some voice-over announcements provided by Vision Impossible themselves. Finishing up the project by mastering our tracks, so they would fit well together in terms of loudness and overall frequency characteristics.
