Kyle Hollingsworth - Prize Cart (Aeon Voyage 2024 Remix)

Here's my 2024 remix for the @electric-forest-official Prize Cart theme! I was thrilled to be one of the winners last year and I'm excited to be entering again!

Story time:

The past month or so has been very difficult for me - struggling with a knee injury, burnout from my day job, and generally just having a hard time with mental health. I couldn't get myself to make music at all during this time and gave up hope on doing a Prize Cart remix for this year. It was really disappointing because of how close this festival has been to my heart for 10 years now.

This all changed after I was invited by some good friends in the Always400 crew to do a 24-hour music production challenge this past week where we faced off against some really awesome producers in the We Are Humans community organized by @donkong. The 24 hours was actually around 6 or so for me because of my day job, but it felt so good to be working on music with a bunch of friends again. This re-lit my drive to make some new music and I impulsively threw this remix together over the weekend, just in time to submit it. It was one of those incredible moments where I just got straight into the flow of creating and everything just came together. It's not perfect, but I really like where it ended up.

It's interesting being burnt out from work but then hustling all weekend to work on this - I still feel drained from spending so much mental energy, but I also feel recharged in a way spending so much time on something I'm so passionate about. I might be more tired, but I'm also a lot more fulfilled than I was a week ago.

I thought I'd share this with you all just as a reminder that if you're in a rut in life, sometimes just diving into something you love (even if you're convinced in the moment that you don't love it anymore) can be really powerful, especially when shared with friends and a supportive community.

I hope you enjoy the remix, that we get to hear this on the big speakers at Electric Forest this year, and that it's good enough that it gets some extra people to stick around and help clean up!