The Defibrillated Collection (2020–2023)

The Defibrillated Collection: 2020–23 is my third studio album and first compilation album, released gradually from 17 May 2025 through to the 29th of that month. The album is a collection of songs recorded between 2020 and 2023, some of which hadn't been released fully, that I had reworked to bring up to my current standards. I made the album to celebrate reaching 500 subscribers on YouTube (not at all huge these days but it still meant something to me), although the concept of the album had been floating around for a while before then.

Background

I started making music in 2020, under the alias of 'DJB'. Having only a little keyboard experience, naturally, the songs I made then were a bit rubbish. I got better at making music over the years, and eventually, feeling the DJB name was a bit basic and not wanting to associate my newer, better music with the name, I changed to Engine Two in late 2022. Much of the music I made as DJB was never released for a number of reasons, primarily because I felt my YouTube channel wasn't a place to put it when I made it, and then later didn't want to release old music because I didn't want people to think this was my new 'latest and greatest'. None of the original DJB stuff is available on this website for a similar reason: I don't want people to associate that old stuff which I don't particularly like with my new stuff which I do. But still, there was quite a bit of music that was being left behind, and so in 2024 I came up with the concept of an album which would feature remixes of these old songs so that I could publish them in a state that I felt happy about. These 'revitalised' versions of old songs I eventually came to call 'defibrillated'.

The idea remained just that, an idea, for some time, until I realised in March 2025 that I was on the verge of 500 subscribers on my YouTube channel. Sure enough, at the end of the month, the milestone came. At that time, I had planned and was in the process of recording two DJ mix series': Mid 90s House Party and Ted's Night in Ninety Nine. On the day the milestone arrived I published a video titled "500 Subs: ok sure i guess" - a harkening back to my oldest subscriber specials, which were just short videos made entirely of iMovie defaults. The video was simply published to acknowledge the achievement; I realised around that time that I needed an actual, big video to celebrate. Going through old ideas, I decided an appropriate solution would be to actually create The Defibrillated Collection. So while I was pushing out my DJ mix videos throughout April, I got to work on remixing.

Recording and production

I spent a little bit selecting the songs which I felt were good enough to be worth bringing back. Most were obvious: tracks which I'd always liked and could see very easily turning into a song I could release. Some further numbers, however, were brought forward because I felt that I couldn't really not include them, possibly because I loved them then but not anymore, or in one case, because I thought it'd be a right laugh. There were five tracks which I had considered but decided against. I started work with the simple ones, tracks like "Deserted Land" and "Blue Monday" which I knew would need a little bit of work and they'd be there. The songs which I knew would take a bit longer, like "Crash Down" and "Popcorn", I procrastinated on a bit. In fact, "Popcorn" wasn't finished until the night before it was released because it just kept on growing! Even so, with the deadline of when my weekly DJ mixes ran out ahead of me, I had a solid motivation to get all the tracks done. The only rogue element was "The Brighter Side of Things", renamed "Hairpin", which I'd made the remix of in late 2024 during a brief breakbeat phase when I wanted to replicate the style of the 1992 classics. Originally I wanted to include it on a new breakbeat EP, but because I loved this new version so much (and because the EP idea didn't seem like it was going anywhere), I put it on this album instead. By mid-May, the album was (for the most part) done.

Release

With the releases of Burning the Daylight Oil and Nachtmusik, I was frustrated that when I scheduled the songs to be released at the same time, they'd all tumble out in a random order, and YouTube would only recommend the last of the videos published, even if it was the weakest track on the album. To combat this with Defibrillated, I decided to release each song on a separate day, starting on May 17, an approach I'm also taking with my upcoming Where do we go from here? project. The release was preceded by an announcement trailer, a parody of the Five Nights a Freddy's 2 trailer, an idea I'd come up with during production because of a similar "reanimated" theme. The album finished being released on May 29.

Songs

"Deserted Land"

I originally wrote "Deserted Land" for a game studio called Nessi Productions in late 2021. As the first thing I'd written for them, the group of five or so which I'd been introduced to by a friend were quite impressed. I always liked the song for its simplicity, its surprising accuracy to the original request (a desert theme), and the little flourish at the start, which happened by accident when I leaned on my keyboard. For the album, I changed the percussion a bit and added an extra instrument, but that was about it.

"Dropped Luggage"

This was one of the songs which I liked then but not anymore, but I felt its significance as the first song I made (to the best of my memory) meant I had to include it. This took a bit more of a reworking, changing bad decisions I'd made because of my lack of practice (e.g. the bassline, if you could even call it that), but I couldn't do much to make that four-note chromatic melody any better (like I said, it was my first song, so there's no guarantee it's going to be good).

"Electrocuted"

This song was one of the main reasons as to why I wanted to find a way to put out my old songs. Even in its original form (which was just the first minute and thirty seconds of what you hear on the album), "Electrocuted" is a banger. It was commissioned by Nessi around the same time as "Deserted Land" for an "attack phase" where enemies get more aggressive, with the request specifying "electric style doom fighting". Naturally, both myself and the commissioners were very pleased with the outcome. For this reason, this song was actually the first one I started working on during the main sessions in April, envisioning a new trance remix with an actual melody this time (wow!). The first attempt fell through, mainly because I was being too ambitious and left the original behind, creating an altogether less interesting and powerful song. So I returned to the original track and worked off of the basis of the pre-existing sounds and structure, basically making this version the original with an extra few minutes tacked on the end.

"Hairpin"

Originally titled "The Brighter Side of Things" (a horrible title that deserved changing), "Hairpin" is ironically both the most recent song included on the album (it was originally made in May 2023, being the only song on the album made that year) and the song I started remixing earliest. In October 2024, I got into Altern-8's 1992 breakbeat classic "Activ 8 (Come With Me)". The song featured sampled crowd noise throughout, a staple of rave tunes of the time like "A Trip to Trumpton" and the KLF's "Stadium House" series. Thinking back to the breakbeat EP that "The Brighter Side of Things" was from, I realised just how far off I was from the style of music I was trying to celebrate. "Brighter Side" sounded like, at best, a demo from that period, not an actual song, let alone the other cuts off that EP. A follow-up EP in the same style had been on my mind since not long after I made the original, and with this spark of motivation, I set off to make the first track. However, the style I was trying to replicate, with its distinctive piano melodies and chord progressions, was surprisingly difficult to recapture. And so, struggling to get things off the ground, I picked out the old Tim Minchin-sampled melody and gave it a go. In the end, I didn't opt for a piano - I don't think I could get the right sound out of it - but I still used some crowd noise (sampled from an Underworld bootleg) and I think I did a pretty decent job with it. Also, since the original sampled sounds from the video game Wipeout, in the theme of far-superior sequels, I sampled sounds from Wipeout 2097 in this version, using much more than I did last time (because going through the sound pack I realised I had different places I could use them in).

Once it was finished, the newly-titled "Hairpin" sat around for a while as the rest of my planned follow-up breakbeat EP never came along. As work started on this album, I toed and froed on including it, but finally decided to because I loved what I'd done with it so much, and also because I wasn't sure the EP would happen. In fact, it still hasn't, and the idea has been absorbed, like most other ideas I had, into my Where do we go from here? project.

"Crash Down"

Yet another "enemies" theme for Nessi Productions, "Crash Down" was aptly made in the final days of the game studio. The original was, to be honest, not much, and was always second fiddle to "Electrocuted". But second fiddle was certainly better than whatever else I was doing at the time, so it was chosen for the album and given the total remix treatment. The new remix was influenced primarily by the good old 1999-era trance, with a hint of acid thrown in (which I totally ripped off from "Teeth of the Jungle" by Terra Ferma, which to be fair is a 1999 trance track), which I had made using the ReBirth RB-338 software.

"Popcorn"

"Popcorn" was originally made as the credits theme for a game called Door Smasher that, once again, was never finished. Of the four tracks made for the soundtrack, this was by far my favourite for its chord progression and unique hi-hat work. The original was once again a bit boring, especially in how it just drones on and on, so this was once again a total remix. This new version, like "Crash Down", is a '99-style trance track with even more acid thrown in this time. It also includes samples I'd recorded on the London tube and the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. This by far took the longest of any of the tracks on the album to make, and as such is the longest of the lot at thirteen and a half minutes, the longest song I've ever made (so far). Part of the reason why it took so long to make is because I accidentally made it modulate in the middle from F Minor to C Minor, something which I didn't realise until working on the final section because there was a lot more dissonance in it than I remembered - as it turns out, I was pulling a Stravinsky and was in two keys at once. As for how you accidentally modulate… ask Mozart.

"Weather Experience"

My remix of The Prodigy's "Weather Experience" was made in late 2022 using a small spark of motivation brought on by hearing the Top Buzz Version of the track, which has a great breakdown but doesn't deliver whatsoever on the drop. My remix is essentially the Top Buzz Version but with my best attempt at a proper drop. The drums were changed for this version to sound more breakbeat-esque and the piano sound was changed to a more classic 90s House detuned piano - an effect I'd tried to achieve on the original version but failed at.

"Archaic"

"Archaic" is like "Dropped Luggage" - an early song that's not my favourite anymore but I liked it then, so it felt worth including. This, like "Dropped Luggage", had some work done to it to just remove bad decisions, add some kind of bass (because the original just straight up didn't have one) and some additional instruments to make it a bit less bare-bones, plus a new middle section (inspired by the 1997 version of "Short Circuit" by Daft Punk).

"Encore Une Fois"

An old mid-90s Euro Trance classic, Sash's "Encore Une Fois", particularly the Future Breeze Remix, is one of those songs which appears on just about every 'Trance Classics' album you can find. As to why I made a remix of it myself, I don't really know. Perhaps I was trying to learn the chords and was inspired to make a remix. Either way, my original remix was total rubbish. A poor choice of sounds, particularly that horrid supersaw, made the track not one you'd think I'd pick out. But, seeing potential, I scrapped the bad parts and replaced them with better ones, including a live TB-303 jam (based on Future Breeze's use of the instrument on their version), and in the end made a calmer version than the original attempts to be as loud as possible.

"Final Sunset"

One of the few Engine Two tracks featured on here, "Final Sunset" was originally made for a competition which I lost. The precursor to my "making a song I'm actually proud of" phase in Burning the Daylight Oil, I put loads of effort into trying to make the original song as good as I could, including (embarrassingly) @ing everyone in the now-dead Nessi Productions Discord server to ask for their opinions, which amounted to "yeah it's fine". Therefore, when working on it here, it didn't take too much to get the song into a state I was happy with.

"Bowling Theme"

Demotivated and lost for ideas in late 2022, I bought a copy of the Reason 3 DAW for Windows XP, as I felt trying a new piece of software might help me out of the hole I was in. Reason proved difficult to grasp, possibly because I was running a twenty-year old version, and I only ended up producing one song in the software, "Bowling Theme". Originally intended to be accompanied by the unfinished "Lobby Theme", this song was to be featured in Roblox Sports, a game my friend C0mplexity was making. As always, the game was never finished. The song however became a sort of inside joke between the two of us, because of just how dumb it seemed to be, capturing the poor-quality speakers and muzak synonymous with Britain's leisure centre boom of the 1970s. When it came to selecting songs for this compilation, I couldn't help but not add this stupid little song, and because it was already perfect as is (and because I didn't want to get Reason back out), it is the only song on this album which has been left entirely unchanged.

"Almost 80s"

The version presented on this album is actually a new version of not the original, but a "Lo-Fi Mix" I made not long afterwards. Most things remained unchanged, like the vinyl surface noise heard throughout, but I removed the full drum set which came in at the end and rendered the whole track a little too energetic to be Lo-Fi, or at least what we commonly use the term for these days (remember, Paul McCartney's first solo album is regularly called one of the first Lo-Fi albums). Instead, the track loses all drums at the end and comes to a calm close.

Now, you may have noticed that the track ordering here has gone up and down in energy: starting ambient, picking up pace, peaking at "Popcorn", and then settling back down to ambient here. However, there is one more song before this album finishes which upsets this whole structure.

"Blue Monday"

My remix of the New Order classic "Blue Monday", made in 2020, was the first time I'd made something under the DJB name that I really liked. And by really liked, I mean I still like the original version. Still, it had its issues. Namely the vocals fell out of sync with the track at times, a bug which was rectified in this version. In fact, I'd wanted to re-release the song with fixed vocals for a number of years leading up to this album, so I was glad to finally have a fixed version out. I also added an extra synth melody in the final section of the song, again an idea I'd come up with some time ago, this time after a friend of mine accidentally played half of "Blue Monday"'s other signature melody on a keyboard and I hurriedly figured out the rest. I put this song at the end of the album because it was one of the main motivations that I had to keep going; I showed myself with this song that I could actually make decent productions from time to time (even if it was someone else's song), so it was worth pushing on just in case another goodie fell out of my DAW.