On November 17, 2017 the "Celebrating Life" album by NOTOPIA was released on CD and digital media. The release page can be found here:
music.mennigmann.com/album/celebrating-life
Soon after that, in Summer 2018, Marc Mennigmann (the man behind the NOTOPIA project) announced a challenging project: the "Celebrate - Remix Contest" (
music.mennigmann.com/album/celebrate-remix-contest). Marc introduces it:
"These are the raw isolated recordings of every instrument on the song "Celebrate" of our album "Celebrating Life". No EQ, no compressor was added. No effects or even panning. Please play around with them, rearrange them, mix them, cut them, mangle them, put them in a different context. In short, please play around with these files and send your results.
The best three remixes will be released as a free download EP here on our BandCamp site, of course mentioning your name as the one who created the remix."
The deadline then was set to June 30, 2018. I took the source files to my sound man Levon Hakhverdyan, described the idea of the contest, and we agreed to participate in the contents. I intentionally did not play the original mix to Levon, so that he could come up with his own vision, which he successfully did by June 28.
Eventually, it did not work as it was planned, and the project was not released. However, life finds strange ways out sometimes. Yesterday Marc Mennigmann kindly allowed me to share our twopence that we contributed with to that unique project.
And so, welcome the Levon Hakhverdyan's mix of "Celebrate" - well in time to celebrate Peter Hammill's 71st birthday!
released November 5, 2019
The musicians of NOTOPIA are:
Peter Alexius (guitar)
Marc Mennigmann (keys)
Sven Kosakowski (drums)
Mike Keneally (guitar)
Jaan Wessman (bass)
featuring Peter Hammill (vocals)
Mixed by Levon Hakhverdyan