T-Pain Celebrates The 3 Winners Of The ‘Wake Up Dead’ Remix Contest: ‘Don’t Sleep On These’

After T-Pain and BPM Create challenged DJs to remix his hit, ‘Wake Up Dead,’ three rose above the rest, and T-Pain tells HL EXCLUSIVELY why MAAHEZ, DISTO, and nesse -j- are the ‘best’ of the best.

A month after T-Pain teamed up with BPM Supreme – the leading music delivery service for professional DJs – to launch the “Wake Up Dead” Remix Contest, a winner was crowned. Scratch that – winners were crowned. After nearly 1,000 entries were submitted, not one, not two, but three DJs – nesse -j-, MAAHEZ, and DISTO – put it down, flipped it, and reversed it to out-remix their competition. These three transformed T-Pain and Chris Brown’s “Wake Up Dead” into something that left the “All I do Is Win” rapper impressed. “Don’t sleep on these remixes, y’all,” T-Pain tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “When I tell you we found the best, we found the best! Big shout out to BPM Supreme and their brand new online sample library, BPM Create. If you haven’t checked them out yet – make sure you do that now.”

The ”Wake Up Dead” remix contest coincided with the launch of BPM Create, BPM Supreme’s new online sample library built for creative music production.. Boasting over 100,000 musical stems, effects, vocals, drum beats, and other royalty-free sounds (whereas the BPM Supreme service offers a record pool featuring more mainstream and commercial sounds.) Co-founder and CEO Angel “AROCK” Castillo tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY how he thinks that the “Wake Up Dead” contest was a smashing success in showcasing the new service. “T-Pain and I couldn’t be happier to give these new artists a platform to showcase their talents during an unprecedented time in the music industry.

“It was not easy to choose these three new producers from the submission pool of talented artists we received,” AROCK tells HollywoodLife. “We look forward to releasing the remixes on all DSPs for the world to listen to with the help of BPM Create!”

So, who are these winners? MAAHEZ says he’s a producer/DJ born in Havana, Cuba, and judging by his Instagram, he has a fondness for extra-terrestrials. DISTO hails from Costa Rica and has been seen at EDM Las Vegas, EDC Mexico, and Life IN Color. As for nesse -j-, the self-described “synth lord” is from San Diego, who boasts “no genres” and a fondness for black-and-white imagery on his IG page.

A song’s remix “tells another side of the story,” T-Pain told HollywoodLife at the start of the “Wake Up Dead” contest. “Lyrics tell a story, give a mood, paint a picture — the beat of the song should do the exact same. If you think about a story, there are always 2 sides to it (if not more). The original song can tell one side of the story while the remix tells [the other].”

When it came to giving praise to a recent remix, both T-Pain and AROCK gave love to Imanbek’s remix of SAINt JHN’s “Roses,” with AROCK saying that specific remix “shows the power of crossover tracks and how a good remix can make a song blow up. Imanbek is just a young kid from Europe, and now that remix has put him on the map and brought more attention to the original track.”

“ ‘Roses’ is super fire,” T-Pain added. “The crazier thing is I heard the remix before I heard the original, so I thought that was the original [laughs]. I mean, that being said, I thought the original was great as well. They just give you two different feels, so it really depends on what type of mood you want to be in.”