New Jersey producer MikeQ has shared the third single from his ballroom label Qween Beat‘s hotly anticipated debut compilation Qweendom, and it’s something of a once-in-a-lifetime treat. “Get Sum” finds Michael Cox sharing a collaboration with legendary house vocalist and producer Romanthony that was begun while he was still alive, and completed after his death in 2013. The singer is perhaps most famous for his work on Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” and Cox expertly works with his voice here by integrating vintage-styled synths and sampling techniques with his own signature approach to high-impact arrangement. In that way it carries a real aura of timelessness, which is more than appropriate for for the intergenerational exchange it represents.
“I want to say I started talking to Anthony in 2011; we had a mutual friend DJ MaryMac in New Jersey who is also currently Madonna’s tour DJ,” said MikeQ to The FADER in an interview. “After he emailed me, I learned that he frequently popped into the live Vogue Knights [a vogue night MikeQ runs in NYC] stream I had going around that time, and he then let me know how inspired he was by the culture.”
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“After a few weeks of talking, he sent me a track he said he had started that was specifically built off his inspiration of what he had seen,” he continued. “I immediately fell In love with it. He had already built most of it, but it was only a draft. Once I had the stems I pretty much broke the entire track down part for part, revamped the samples, and rebuilt the entire track with my added touch, extended and finished it. Due to his 2013 passing, he unfortunately would never get to hear the finished product. This track is his dedication to the ballroom culture and mine to him.”
Meet the stars of New York’s ballroom community in THUMP’s Vogue Nights documentary, and after that revisit the predictably impeccable mix MikeQ was kind enough to do for us in 2014.
QWEENDOM will be out this Friday, August 12, and is currently available for pre-order.
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