Welcome back to another installment of Forgotify’s Finest, or as I call it: What The Hell Am I Doing Here. Last time I did one of these, I added another rule to my original list. I also decided these function better as general guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules:
The track must be music, not any old sound recording.
The track has to sound relatively professional. No kids playing acoustic guitar into the Music Memos app.
The track ideally is attached to a full project.
The new guideline: The track can’t just be bad. There has to be something more going on that I can talk about.
This time around, I was able to find something intriguing after just a few minutes of browsing. “Touch Me - Steve Lombardo Remix” meets all my criteria. It’s a pretty high-production value song attached to a remix album with four other songs (not including the original “Touch Me”). Best of all, it’s not bad. And here at Off Pitch, not bad is good enough.
I stopped on this song for a couple reasons. The first and most obvious: it didn’t sound like garbage. The second: a “Steve Lombardo Remix” implies the existence of an original “Touch Me.” And maybe there’s more to be explored there.
Turns out my instincts were right. I couldn’t find much on Steve Lombardo, but a quick search for Jody Vukas brought me right to his various internet profiles. Although Vukas doesn’t have a ton of streams or monthly followers, his social media is evidence that he’s still actively making music. This surprised me, considering the original “Touch Me” came out in 2008 and most artists I bump into on Forgotify aren’t still in the game. My guess is that this particular song was a Forgotify candidate because it’s a small artist’s remix of a small song. Given his social media following, Vukas likely has plays on other tracks.
All of this is well and good, but it takes a little bit more to make a series as prestigious as Forgotify’s Finest. So it comes in handy that Vukas has a cool day job: he runs a cannabis cultivation consultancy (say that five times fast) based in Denver, Colorado. In addition to being impressed by Vukas’s jack-of-all-trades nature, I was intrigued by this particular combination of trades. When I think of EDM, I imagine shady dealers pushing their product in club bathrooms, not responsible business owners making an honest living in an increasingly-accepted industry.
I think this potentially outdated association speaks to my ignorance of house music and EDM in general. You may have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned the music itself in this so-called music review, and that’s for good reason. It sounds well-made to me, but I have no frame of reference to judge it beyond that. All of the remixes on this project clearly sound different, but if I were to try and describe each of them, my descriptions would not. It would be obvious that I don’t know what I’m talking about, assuming that it’s not already.
This foray into house music has made it clear to me that I need to spend more time in the realm of EDM. I want to be able to speak knowledgeably on as many genres as possible, and my familiarity with electronic music is just not there yet. And if this is what Forgotify’s Finest is developing into, then so be it. At its core, it’s a music discovery program, and there’s no reason to think myself above it.
If you’re a fan of house, give these remixes a listen. Hopefully some of you are able to appreciate them better than I can. And maybe one day, when I’m a major house head, I’ll be able to say that “Touch Me” and its remixes were the songs that started it all.
Lyle B.