After Daniel Avery spent almost three years submerged in the production style of his 2025 electronic/alt-metal album, Tremor, one might think his identity was wrapped up in the music. But when the British producer decided to remix the LP as Tremor (Midnight Versions), he approached them with complete separation — as if he was working with another artist’s music.

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“I really like being presented with someone else’s folder of ideas and imagination, and then shaping it into something else,” Avery says. “Even though I was extremely familiar with [Tremor], that separation felt liberating. I treated each one with the [night]club front and center. I told myself I was never going to be too precious with the originals. Some of the tracks bear a strong resemblance, but some of them do not. That was conscious. I wanted to treat every remix as if it were its own track.”

For Midnight Versions, Avery was the sole remixer for every track on the original. This wasn’t the initial plan. Avery, the dance music producer, took his hand at remixing Tremor by Avery, the electronic/alt-metal producer, and ended up remixing all of Tremor’s 13 tracks in six weeks.

“I [remixed] Greasy off the Racing Line and Rapture in Blue, and I was so happy with the results that I just kept going,” says Avery, the dance music producer. “It was nice to work in a more urgent way. I’ve always found that the club music I’ve made that’s connected the most has come about without much thought.”

Midnight Versions ended up taking on a life of its own. The club versions captured the same energy he poured into Tremor, but they needed their own order to tell their own story. It’s not an extension of the original; it’s a freestanding release that exists in the same sonic universe as Tremor.

“I was so proud, and still am so proud of Tremor. It really feels like such an honest representation of where my head was at in that moment. It always had its own very strong identity,” Avery says. “[With] Midnight Versions, I could just open another door to that world.”

Avery has spent most of his professional life in the club world. So, even though songs on Tremor are fit for vigorous mosh pits (he especially shouts out Soundiron’s guitar plugin Axe Machina for that), driving elements such as distortion and basslines connect back to the rave. These were often his bridge between the originals and the remixes.

Greasy off the Racing Line features legendary alt-rock singer Allison Mosshart leading a fiery choir of the damned from the speakers with her relentless, frightening tone. However, Avery’s Midnight Version filters down the intense dissonance and replaces it with a high-speed jungle beat.

So, for Mosshart’s vocal to retain its power in the less busy mix, Avery simply added a layer of distortion with FabFilter Saturn to make it more “demonic.” Instead of the front of an evil battalion, the voice becomes the kind of unshakable utterance that infects the mind during a deep, dancefloor flow state.

“There’s not tons done to [the vocal] at all,” Avery says. “The way it was made on the original was compressed heavily. So, [I added] distortion, particularly in the real top end of it. ‘A demonic phone call’ is the brief I gave myself.”

Not every track on Tremor is as foreboding. Some reflect Avery’s talent for crafting intricate electronic music. One such piece is the enchanting harmonic ambient composition, Neon Pulse. For that Midnight Version, he crafted a breakbeat out of his massive library of live and electronic drums he’s accrued over the years. Then he slightly rearranged the original, which was a freeform synth jam, to align. Another key addition was the Reese bass, one of the classic sounds of electronic club music.

“Adding that Reese bass is something that I’ve been doing on a few remixes recently, and I think it’s starting to become a slight signature sound of mine,” Avery explains. “There’s a breakbeat. There’s a beautiful melody. But then this Reese bass, which is very melodic but has a real weight to it, is able to give it that propulsive quality.”

The Midnight Version of Rapture in Blue follows a similar formula. The song, which features the sweet vocals of Cecile Believe, shifts from dense indie to pristine breakbeat, borrowing the layers from the original for burning effects on the remix.

But that cleanliness to the sound actually demonstrates the one aspect of Midnight Versions where Avery wasn’t able to separate the remixes from the originals —at least not on his own. After he finished an initial rendition of the Rapture in Blue remix, he played it live and discovered the mixdown was not fit for the club.

“I obviously still had my brain too deep inside Tremor. Even though I thought I’d made a club version of it, it was way too muddy, way too murky. No separation,” Avery says. “The whole idea of the original is that it’s extremely dense, layered, and tightly woven. That’s what creates that wall of sound.”

To release the new versions from that, Avery brought in Pearson Sound to complete the mixdowns. Similar to how Avery approached each remix as if the tracks were made by another artist, Pearson Sound asked Avery which songs from other artists he would want the remixes to sound like.

“The way my brain was working, I was thinking ‘Which DJ would I love to hand this one to?’” Avery says. “Once that first one was done, I knew that I could call on Pearson Sound to do the mixing, which gave me more creative freedom. The real intricacies of the dynamics are going to be dialed in at the last moment. I can just see what happens.”

The “let’s see what happens” attitude was the key to Midnight Versions. Avery wanted to make some remixes of Tremor for the club, and it happened to go so well that he made a complete counterpart to the album. When the approach is built on a lack of expectations, there’s no telling where the music might end up.

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