![Delving into a dichotomy: Kaskade discusses the making of ‘Fire & Ice v3′[Interview]271306914 501536497910379 8225680520323669297 N](https://dancingastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/271306914_501536497910379_8225680520323669297_n.jpg)
Delving into a dichotomy: Kaskade discusses the making of ‘Fire & Ice v3′[Interview]
“Probably” two months before October 2, 2021, but “maybe” three, Kaskade sat in his studio, pondering what he’d play at Fire & Ice‘s 10-year anniversary event.
Upon its October 25, 2011 release via Ultra Records, Fire & Ice crossed off two career firsts for Kaskade: first concept album and first double-sided album. In retrospect, and in the context of his discography to date, Kaskade—who is known offstage as Ryan Raddon—is adamant that, although “all of [his] albums have a concept behind them,” none have been bolstered by one “as big and as grand as Fire & Ice‘s.”
10 years prior, when Fire & Ice was merely a creative figment in Raddon’s mind, he’d considered calling the project Day & Night. He knew he wanted to do a dual-disc album, and, at the time, Day & Night felt like an ideal titular embodiment of the LP’s dichotomous theme. The first side, Kaskade explained in an interview with Dancing Astronaut, would maintain something of a “pool party vibe” and the second, “a nightclub vibe.” Thus, Day & Night.
Day & Night would eventually become Fire & Ice, a transition that’s owed in large part to Kid Cudi’s 2008 release of “Day ‘n’ Night,” the pervasiveness of which was amplified by Crookers’ viral remix of the Man On The Moon: The End Of Day tracklisting.
“Kid Cudi had that big tune and I was like ‘oh, I can’t call this Day & Night.’ I mean, that’s fine for my hard drive in the studio—that’s great. So I came up with two things that are opposing each other, fire and ice. It makes sense for the concept of the album, and I actually do like Day & Night much better, but Fire & Ice it is, and I still think it really works,” Kaskade recalled.
In fact, as Kaskade sat in his studio in the summer of 2021, perusing his old hard drives in preparation for the anniversary show at Irvine, California’s FivePoint Amphitheatre, he’d “kind of forgotten” that Fire & Ice had once been known by a different name—at least to him. “When I was looking on the old hard drives, looking back at all of this, it was like ‘oh yeah, that’s right. I had called this Day & Night,” he said.
But amidst the stroll down music’s memory lane, a question remained: what was he to play at this anniversary show?
“I was like, ‘Okay. I need to have this conversation with myself. What am I supposed to play? Am I only supposed to play the originals?'”
—Kaskade
In search of his answer, he started re-listening to Fire & Ice. Kaskade will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t walk around his studio pulling out old vinyls to the soundtrack of self-exclamations like, “Oh my gosh, look who I worked with on this record. I remember that night in the studio!” No, he doesn’t do that very often, and given both this and the depth and expanse of his discography, it’s natural that a run-through of Fire & Ice was necessary to settle his thought, “what was all on that record?” So, he put on Fire & Ice.
“I sat there and listened to it and I was like, ‘I could play this. I could play that. I could play this. They don’t sound 10 years old to me, they’re still strong songs.’ I was like, ‘man I am freaking stoked; this thing still stands off.’ I put in the work and it was a cool moment for me. I’m really proud of that album,” Kaskade said.
As any dedicated attendee of a Kaskade show knows and knows well, mashups are often a staple of his sets. He finds it “fun to add something that [he] wrote to a new sonic landscape,” adding that, “at its core, that’s what dance music is.” That considered, he contemplated approaching the then-upcoming anniversary event—dubbed “Kaskade in the Park”—as an opportunity to “play a bunch of mashups,” and shared the idea with his team:
“Everyone was like, ‘you’re an idiot dude. These people are gonna wanna hear the originals.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right. What am I thinking? Of course they’re gonna wanna hear the originals.’
But that’s really where this light bulb clicked on, and I was like, ‘What if I took one or two of ’em and have a new take?’ Like what if I was making one of them today? What would it sound like if I made ‘Eyes’ today, for instance? I could play the originals at the front of the set and then play some of these new versions at the end of the set.”
Thus, Fire & Ice v3 was born. And although the intention was to release the remake album on Fire & Ice‘s 10th anniversary, the project took “much longer” than Kaskade originally expected, prompting the decision to push the LP’s rollout. A little over two months after Kaskade in the Park, “Turn It Down v3” would provide the introduction to Fire & Ice v3. With Cop Kid standing in for the original vocalists, Rebecca & Fiona, the recasting took on a moodier, Redux-suited dress.
In the time after “Turn It Down v3’s” December 6 debut, Kaskade dispensed nine Fire & Ice conversions before formally releasing Fire & Ice v3 in full on February 4: “Lessons In Love v3,” “ICE v3,” “How Long v3,” “Let Me Go v3,” “Llove v3,” “Room for Happiness v3,” “Eyes v3,” “Waste Love v3,” and “Lick It v3.”
Most of the Fire & Ice v3 reworks feature different vocalists, such as “Turn It Down v3” (with Cop Kid instead of Rebecca & Fiona), “Lessons In Love v3” (with Cayson Renshaw instead of Neon Trees), “ICE” (with The Moth & The Flame instead of Dan Black), “Llove v3” (with Lipless instead of Haley), “Eyes v3” (with Ella Vos instead of Mindy Gledhill), and “Waste Love v3” (with PYFER instead of Quadron). Just three of the aforementioned conversions retained their original vocalist: “How Long v3” (with Late Night Alumni), “Let Me Go v3” (with Marcus Bentley), and “Room For Happiness v3” (with Skylar Grey).
The vocal choices came down to “ease and availability a lot of times, and that kind of goes along with the speed of how I work,” Kaskade said when asked to explain the strategy behind vocalist selection for Fire & Ice v3. “If I hit somebody up and they’re like, ‘I can’t get to the studio for a month’ or ‘I don’t have time to track it,’ or ‘I’m out of the country,’ it’s like, ‘Okay cool, I’ll get somebody else to do it, no worries.'”
Rebecca & Fiona, for instance, are in Sweden, so Kaskade turned to Utah duo Cop Kid for “Turn It Down v3,” which features vocals from Cop Kid’s Marny. “I was like ‘oh I’ve got these friends, Cop Kid, I think they’ll sound great. Let’s try this out,'” Kaskade recalled. “It was just one of those wing it things, like it’s a Tuesday night, let’s just try it.”
The vocalists on the Fire & Ice conversions represent the “people who were around and available,” as well as the people whom Kaskade is “into right now.” In short, he says there was “no kind of real process to it”; much of the vocalist involvement came down to accessibility, but all of it revolved around “just working with people that I enjoy,” he said.
Throughout the process of remaking Fire & Ice, Kaskade has grappled with how the “v3s” will be received by his following, largely because “it’s always hard to re-imagine something that people have connected with.” That’s precisely why he cites “Eyes” as the most challenging Fire & Ice original to reframe on Fire & Ice v3:
“For me, ‘Eyes’ is such a seminal tune and so many people associate that song with me. They might not even be a Kaskade ‘fan,’ but they have ‘Eyes’ on their phone or at the first festival they ever went to, I played ‘Eyes.’ I mean, I’ve heard countless stories about this song and I think I’ve probably played it in almost every show—if not every show outside of a small handful—that I’ve ever played since the day I wrote and bounced it down in the studio. So for me, it’s a very personal song and, not that the others aren’t, but this one was a challenge. I think it was because so many people connect with this song and that knowledge was hanging over my head. It means something to them, and I don’t want to mess with that.”
The deeply personal identifications that his listeners have developed with songs like “Eyes” and the significance that these productions have taken on over the years have led Kaskade to feel a “responsibility” to relate that the “v3s” are “something totally different” that doesn’t stand in competition with the first two versions. He’s adamant that the “v3s” are accessories to these existing takes; they’re not intended to replace, but rather add to—to exist in complementary fashion with Fire & Ice‘s widely embraced originals.
“I feel like dance music is always so competitive, like ‘number five DJ in the world’ or ‘No. 1 song,’ we’re always looking to market and brand ourselves. We need these numbers to attach ourselves to or whatever. But [with Fire & Ice v3], it’s really not a competition; I wasn’t trying to outdo the other versions. For me, [a ‘v3’] is just another take, it’s a different version. And listen, I even had to tell myself that sometimes in this process. I’d go, ‘This just doesn’t hold a candle to this other version, so I don’t want to put it out.’ And it’s like, this is totally different, why am I comparing this to something completely different?”
—Kaskade on making Fire & Ice v3
Comically, although the remake LP and its tracklistings derive their “v3” titling convention from the reality that they’re simply the third versions of these songs officially released—with the Fire & Ice originals and their “ICE Mix” accompaniments counting as versions one and two, respectively—for some updates, “v3” is something of a misnomer. With a laugh, Kaskade notes that version three of ‘Eyes,’ for example, is “really more like version 26.”
This series was the result of “long discussions” with himself in the studio about how to approach the “Eyes” remake during Fire & Ice‘s creative revision, even though Kaskade “typically doesn’t second-guess” himself. “I don’t spend a lot of time going, ‘oh I should have done this and I should have done that,’ but when you’re going back and revisiting old stuff, I think it’s part of the process,” he attests. “Usually I’m like, ‘Do I like it? Does this work? Does this feel right? Yep? Okay cool, bounce it down.’ I don’t have these long discussions with myself, and I think early in my career, that worked to my advantage because I was able to put out so much music.”
Outside of a “couple little hiccups where I was second-guessing myself, it was really rewarding,” Kaskade says of the process of re-recording and reproducing Fire & Ice. “I had a blast doing it, it was super fun, and although it was a little tricky, I’m really happy with what I have.”
Although some of the songs on Fire & Ice v3 might not be heard live, according to Kaskade, “a lot of them will be, because that’s just where my head is more these days.” “Eyes v3” will be among those to get live play out, with Kaskade musing that it’ll be “fun” to slip that new version into sets “when it’s appropriate.”
In what will be welcome news to Kaskade’s following, 2022 holds the promise of another Kaskade album—but it won’t be one on which he’s re-recording and reproducing any part of his discography. “Revisiting something old is not on the scratch” per Kaskade, who says he “definitely plans on putting out a new album” next.
“When I say that, people are like, ‘Well, have you started?’ and I go, ‘No, I haven’t, but that’s a whole other conversation,” he said. “As the pandemic was happening, I was planning on doing something, but then decided that I needed to hold off because so much of my music is tied to my live show. I didn’t want to put out something that I couldn’t tour behind, so I kind of pumped the brakes on all of that, but I’ve got big stuff planned for 2022.”
Fire & Ice v3 will soundtrack the interim between the release of Kaskade’s first full-length remake LP and his next studio album. Stream Fire & Ice v3 below.
Featured image: Kaskade/Instagram