As is pretty much always the case with me and my producing, this one started out as something completely different, before it derailed and became what you have now. I set out to remix one of my favorite tracker songs, which is Signia by Jogeir Liljedahl. But as I started to disect the inner workings of that song I realised that the melody Jogeir used in Signia is a cover of the theme from The Snowman, an animated show from the 80s that used to run during christmas over here. I had forgotten about that one. And nobody loves finding old gems more than me. All of a sudden I had another childhood memory to work with – and well-known lyrics as well. Double whammy. Off I went on my merry way to make a my first very own little christmas song.

Born in 1997, Aria Cariño is a native of Antipolo City in the Philippines. In 2018 she actually was a 1st Generation Candidate for MNL48 (in short for MaNiLa48) which is a Filipina girl idol group. She dropped out of that eventually to pursue other things. Since we recorded this song together, she has graduated med-school as a licensed physician and chemist – running her own clinic. Great voice and fun to work with.

It was made in FLStudio 20 Producer Edition with these VST instruments:

• Synapse Dune 3
• Reveal Sound Spire
• ReFX Nexus
• Image-Line FLEX

Oh boy was this ever a job and a half. I spent ages on this. Giving up several times and picking it back up. I see in the project files that I spent about 35 active hours on it. Some 27 mixer tracks and 75 different plugin instances. Anyway, after writing the lyrics for this I decided I also wanted the original japanese lyrics from the movie. At one point I contemplated singing those myself. Let’s all be thankful I did not go down road – I just sing the english parts. Got in touch with Aria, who speaks Japanese, and she got it done perfectly. We had loads of fun with that. Everything came together nicely and the massive undertaking is now an awesome memory for the vault.

Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz aired in 1998, after having it’s original three episode run combined into a feature film. And the ending theme for the movie was White Reflection by Two-Mix, which is the song we cover here. Two-Mix was a japanese K-Pop duo doing pretty cool electropop. They are active to this day.