A friend of mine contacted me recently to tell me he had been listening to a few of my Eros Plus Melody mixes. It must be close to 10 years ago that I gave him a few samples. He mentioned how much he liked them and asked if there were more. Hell yes! 45 in total (and counting?), to be exact. After that, I took a stroll down memory lane and gave those particular mixes a listen.
When I started putting these mixes together almost 15 years ago, the music was new and exciting. At that time it felt like I was one of a special few people who knew about this stuff. My gateway was not especially unique—it was Ennio Morricone, to this day among my desert island musicians. From there I navigated through the incredible sounds of Italian cinema: Umiliani, Cipriani, Micalizzi, Piccioni…and through to the world of Library: Mansfield, Nilovic, McDonald, Sorgini, Barigozzi… I discovered this amazing stuff with the help of the early rites of passage in the 2000s, fabled blogs like Fraykers Revenge and Retroteque. Along the way I met a few like-minded people, and then I discovered the crown jewel, a cosmic meeting place for like-minded Library music misfits, the LMT discussion board. From that point, with the help of many of the LMT legends (too numerous to name), my knowledge of Library and Cinematic music grew vastly, not to mention my music collection!
Returning to repeated listenings of the ePm series after all these years, my biggest quibble is with the fidelity. These mixes were made back in the wild, wild west of primitive vinyl ripping and early digital downloading, when bit rates were given too little consideration. Lossless was an obscure term and the choice between 128 kbps and 320 was more about how much music we could fit on our 120 GB hard drives than it was about the quality of sound.
Another thing that stands out is how unsophisticated my mixing skills were 15 years ago. It’s not so much the sequencing of tracks, but I had a very bad habit of infringing on the end of tracks, cross-fading and other unnecessary track-blending techniques. Occasionally it worked, but in general I had no idea what I was doing. I’ve learned in my maturity to mostly stay out of the way of the music and give the tracks a little more breathing room. And the cover art…it wasn’t bad for the time, it certainly was no Fraykers, but let’s be honest, with today’s advances in digital design, it looks quite shit, so that gets a proper polishing, too!
As for the specs, I want to keep the mixes as close to the originals as possible. The main task will be replacing the low bitrate tracks with flac. A heads up to the hi-fi crowd, for the few tracks that I’m unable to corral in lossless, the file will still be converted to flac. I anticipate this being fairly rare, but I’ll convert lossy to flac anyway to maintain consistency. You won’t know if a flac file is lossy unless you have a golden ear or run a test. I’ll share both a single-track mix and a multi-track version in flac. For the most part, I’ll keep the same tracks, and in the same order except where I find a more agreeable placement. There may also be the possible omission or addition of a track here and there. All the links to the old ePm mixes have been disabled.
It’s unlikely I’ll be sharing every ePm reboot. In retrospect, some colored a bit too far outside the lines for my taste; others I simply don’t love much. I also won’t be sharing the remasters in any particular order. I’ll start with a handful of my personal favorites. However, if you have read this far, and you want a favorite mix remastered, leave a note in the comments. I’ll do my best to remaster it as soon as I can. ePm 8 in the Comments. Happy listening!
