The Making of Belizean Heat: Part 3 – Wind Dancer

The third song on Belizean Heat was inspired largely by my discovery of Neros77’s Youtube channel. Basically he takes synthwave songs, and makes custom music videos for them using footage from action movies and anime from the 80s. If you’re not familiar with synthwave, it’s a genre of electronic music that draws heavily on pop music, as well as film and video game soundtracks from that decade of hair spray, spandex, and shoulder pads. Because the music sounds like it was made in the time frame of these movies, they pair together perfectly. If you check out his channel you’ll see scenes from Bloodsport, Knight Rider, Scarface, and Akira married to the music of artists like Garth Knight, Lazerhawk, and Mitch Murder. Personally, this retro music also reminds me of the soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which is set in a fictional version of Miami.

The original working title of the song was Go Fast Boat, a term that had stuck with me from the more recent Miami Vice remake, just because I thought it was so stupid. We travelled from place to place by boat s of varying speeds while travelling in Belize, which is quite fascinating with all of the mangrove islands. Some of them even have networks of narrow maze-like channels.

During our stay at Hideaway Caye, our hostess would often listen to a naval radio. They ran a small boat access restaurant as part of their operation (their food was fantastic by the way), and sometimes their customers would announce that they were planning to visit by broadcasting it via radio. The radio itself had a lot of personality and made a variety of squawks and burbles that I just had to record, which naturally provided the foundation for this song.

This song made heavy use of my analog synths, particularly the Dave Smith Poly Evolver. I really love using it for lush pads, but it can make some punchy stabs and leads too. This song probably has my most self indulgent keyboard solo…

Part four returns to Caye Caulker with The Split.