Remix

A remix, also sometimes called reorchestration or rework, is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, poem, or photograph can be remixes. The only necessary characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new.
Most commonly, remixes are a subset of audio mixing in music and song recordings. Songs may be remixed for a variety of reasons:

to adapt or revise a song for radio or nightclub play
to create a stereo or surround sound version of a song where none was previously available
to improve the fidelity of an older song for which the original master has been lost or degraded
to alter a song to suit a specific music genre or radio format
to use some of the original song's materials in a new context, allowing the original song to reach a different audience
to alter a song for artistic purposes
to provide additional versions of a song for use as bonus tracks or for a B-side, for example, in times when a CD single might carry a total of 4 tracks
to create a connection between a smaller artist and a more successful one, as was the case with Fatboy Slim's remix of "Brimful of Asha" by Cornershop
to improve the first or demo mix of the song, generally to ensure a professional product
to improve a song from its original state

Remixes should not be confused with edits, which usually involve shortening a final stereo master for marketing or broadcasting purposes. Another distinction should be made between a remix, which recombines audio pieces from a recording to create an altered version of a song, and a cover: a re-recording of someone else's song.
While audio mixing is one of the most popular and recognized forms of remixing, this is not the only media form which is remixed in numerous examples. Literature, film, technology, and social systems can all be argued as a form of remix.

Origins

Modern remixing had its roots in the dance-hall culture of late-1960s and early-1970s Jamaica. The fluid evolution of music that encompassed ska, rocksteady, reggae and dub was embraced by local music mixers who deconstructed and rebuilt tracks to suit the tastes of their audience. Producers and engineers like Ruddy Redwood, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry popularized stripped-down instrumental mixes of reggae tunes. At first, they simply dropped the vocal tracks, but soon more sophisticated effects were created, dropping separate instrumental tracks in and out of the mix, isolating and repeating hooks, and adding various effects like echo, reverberation and delay. The German krautrock band Neu! also used other effects on side two of their album Neu! 2 by manipulating their previously released single Super/Neuschnee multiple ways, utilizing playback at different turntable speeds or mangling by using a cassette recorder.
From the mid-1970s, DJs in early discothèques were performing similar tricks with disco songs to get dancers on the floor and keep them there. One noteworthy figure was Tom Moulton, who invented the dance remix as we now know it. Though not a DJ, Moulton had begun his career by making a homemade mix tape for a Fire Island dance club in the late 1960s. His tapes eventually became popular and he came to the attention of the music industry in New York City. At first, Moulton was simply called upon to improve the aesthetics of dance-oriented recordings before release. Eventually, he moved from being a "fix it" man on pop records to specializing in remixes for the dance floor. Along the way, he invented the breakdown section and the 12-inch single vinyl format. Walter Gibbons provided the dance version of the first commercial 12-inch single. Contrary to popular belief, Gibbons did not mix the record. In fact his version was a re-edit of the original mix. Moulton, Gibbons and their contemporaries at Salsoul Records proved to be the most influential group of remixers for the disco era. The Salsoul catalog is seen as being the "canon" for the disco mixer's art form. Pettibone is among a very small number of remixers whose work successfully transitioned from the disco to the House era. His contemporaries included Arthur Baker and François Kevorkian.
Contemporaneously to disco in the mid-1970s, the dub and disco remix cultures met through Jamaican immigrants to the Bronx, energizing both and helping to create hip-hop music. Key figures included, DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Cutting and scratching became part of the culture, creating what Slate magazine called "real-time, live-action collage." One of the first mainstream successes of this style of remix was the 1983 track Rockit by Herbie Hancock, as remixed by Grand Mixer D.ST. Malcolm McLaren and the creative team behind ZTT Records would feature the "cut up" style of hip hop on such records as "Duck Rock". English duo Coldcut's remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full" Released in October 1987 is said to have "laid the groundwork for hip hop's entry into the UK mainstream". Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian named it a "benchmark remix" and placed it in his top ten list of remixes. The Coldcut remix "Seven Minutes of Madness" became one of the first commercially successful remixes, becoming a top fifteen hit in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

History

Early pop remixes were fairly simple; in the 1980s, "extended mixes" of songs were released to clubs and commercial outlets on vinyl 12-inch singles. These typically had a duration of six to seven minutes, and often consisted of the original song with 8 or 16 bars of instruments inserted, often after the second chorus; some were as simplistic as two copies of the song stitched end to end. As the cost and availability of new technologies allowed, many of the bands who were involved in their own production experimented with more intricate versions of the extended mix. Madonna began her career writing music for dance clubs and used remixes extensively to propel her career; one of her early boyfriends was noted DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who created several mixes of her work.
Art of Noise took the remix styles to an extreme—creating music entirely of samples. They were among the first popular groups to truly harness the potential that had been unleashed by the synthesizer-based compositions of electronic musicians such as Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Giorgio Moroder, and Jean-Michel Jarre. Contemporaneous to Art of Noise was the seminal body of work by Yello. Primarily because they featured sampled and synthesized sounds, Yello and Art of Noise would produce a great deal of influential work for the next phase. Others such as Cabaret Voltaire and the aforementioned Jarre were equally influential in this era.
After the rise of dance music in the late 1980s, a new form of remix was popularised, where the vocals would be kept and the instruments would be replaced, often with matching backing in the house music idiom. Jesse Saunders, known as The Originator of House Music, was the first producer to change the art of remixing by creating his own original music, entirely replacing the earlier track, then mixing back in the artist's original lyrics to make his remix. He introduced this technique for the first time with the Club Nouveau song "It's a Cold, Cold World", in May 1988. Another clear example of this approach is Roberta Flack's 1989 ballad "Uh-Uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out ", which Chicago House great Steve "Silk" Hurley dramatically reworked into a boisterous floor-filler by stripping away all the instrumental tracks and substituting a minimalist, sequenced "track" to underpin her vocal delivery, remixed for the UK release which reached No1 pop by Simon Harris. The art of the remix gradually evolved, and soon more avant-garde artists such as Aphex Twin were creating more experimental remixes of songs, which varied radically from their original sound and were not guided by pragmatic considerations such as sales or "danceability", but were created for "art's sake".
In the 1990s, with the rise of powerful home computers with audio capabilities came the mashup, an unsolicited, unofficial remix created by "underground remixers" who edit two or more recordings together. Girl Talk is perhaps the most famous of this movement, creating albums using sounds entirely from other music and cutting it into his own. Underground mixing is more difficult than the typical official remix because clean copies of separated tracks such as vocals or individual instruments are usually not available to the public. Some artists embraced this trend and outspokenly sanctioned fan remixing of their work; there was once a web site which hosted hundreds of unofficial remixes of Björk's songs, all made using only various officially sanctioned mixes. Other artists, such as Erasure, have included remix software in their officially released singles, enabling almost infinite permutations of remixes by users. The band has also presided over remix competitions for their releases, selecting their favourite fan-created remix to appear on later official releases.
Remixing has become prevalent in heavily synthesized electronic and experimental music circles. Many of the people who create cutting-edge music in such genres as synthpop and aggrotech are solo artists or pairs. They will often use remixers to help them with skills or equipment that they do not have. Artists such as Chicago-based Delobbo, Dallas-based LehtMoJoe, and Russian DJ Ram, who has worked with t.A.T.u., are sought out for their remixing skill and have impressive lists of contributions. It is not uncommon for industrial bands to release albums that have remixes as half of the songs. Indeed, there have been popular singles that have been expanded to an entire album of remixes by other well-known artists.
Some industrial groups allow, and often encourage, their fans to remix their music, notably Nine Inch Nails, whose website contains a list of downloadable songs that can be remixed using Apple's GarageBand software. Some artists have started releasing their songs in the U-MYX format, which allows buyers to mix songs and share them on the U-MYX website.