Origin Story
Putting together the remix albums for FEZ was quite fun, and it was exciting getting remixes in from people and hearing all the various takes on the material. That was the best part!
I think someone else had the idea, but I can't remember who. People started approaching me with remixes after some word got out that there was a remix album in the works. I only asked a handful of people, but got some really great remixes from people I didn't ask or know, and they ended up making it into the project because of their quality level. I initially intended to do a single remix album, but due to the number of remixes I split it into two parts, ⌾FZ: Side F, and ⌾FZ: Side Z.
FZ: Side E
Also tucked away on the second remix album is a mini EP of sorts which contains all the game and promotional music not released on the original soundtrack.
Launch Trailer
"Long" Trailer, aka "Trail" from Side E.
Putting It All Together
It might seem obvious, but it's worth mentioning that there is quite a lot of correspondence that goes into the process.
One of the early challenges is figuring out how to collect all the work together, how to build a tracklisting, and how to make sure you don't have 20 people all remixing the same song - that happened somewhat in the case of "Adventure", and I tried to avoid this by asking people to pick track(s) they wanted to remix, and letting them know when certain tracks had been accounted for. At the end of the day though, I still received like 6 or 7 "Adventure" remixes, and decided to relegate some of them to the end of Side Z (the second album) as "bonus" tracks, just to keep the listening experience from feeling too monotonous.
Rights & Legal Issues
The biggest hurdle really with staging a remix album is all the bureaucracy you (potentially) have to deal with. When later on I participated in a remix album for Beasts of Balance, we intentionally didn't do a wider distribution because of the experience I had with FZ.
If you're planning to do a remix album it's important to be aware of the choices you make regarding rights assignment, and revenue splitting with remix artists. The more generous you are, the more complicated it can get unfortunately. We had to sign agreements with every artist, and then setting up revenue splits with everyone can also be cumbersome. There's also the (theoretical) matter of any future usage situations, which may require multiple signoffs depending on how you structure things.
The simplest setup is probably just to do the same rights assignment for every track - either let the remixers retain full rights to the masters, or you retain them. This way, you don't have to handle different tracks differently. I made the mistake of treating some tracks as covers, and others as unique works - this made things a bit more complicated later on.
I recently contributed to a remix album where the artist had a lot of trouble with their distributor getting all the artists' signoff permission to release the album. This is also a potential hurdle, especially with the more hands off distributors, who look for you to get these kinds of permissions so that they are absolved of any liability in the event someone's music is released without their knowledge or permission.
Even with all that said I'm really glad we made the FZ albums, and people genuine love them. So I think the hassle was worth it ! Just worth considering some of the things that can come along with it : )