It's all about the breakdown. Just. F*ckin. Massive.
This track has been edited slightly from its original format to give it some proper beats to DJ with at the start ...In other Rapture related news ... I've got a ticket to see The Specials next year. How Happy Am I ?
Took me a little while to dig out this one - only a couple of years ago but seems to have disappeared from the net despite the popularity of the Klaxons. I suspect they covered Kick's Like A Mule rave classic "The Bouncer" as a pisstake, that somehat backfired on them as they got tagged with the "nu-rave" albatross. Kicks Like A Mule returned the favour by "covering" Gravity's Rainbow, which you can hear on their myspace. South Central managed to put the rave back into the Klaxon's version however with their illicit bootleg remix
Still not as good as the original though ...
One of these days, I'm gonna write down my password for this blog !
Since both Acid Ted and Audio.Out did such excellent posts on Progessive House (and Spooky in particular for one part) it seemed rude not to post what is one of my all time favourite remixes. Unusual perhaps because no 3rd party remixer is involved here - it's the band remixing themselves, but boy, what a job. It reminds me a lot of Orbital's "Belfast" in certain parts, as well as Orbital in general thanks to the increasing loops of chord progression. Never once does it get dull however. In fact ... it's so good that would pretty obviously later become the basis for "Expander" when Spooky started working with Sasha. No better excuse really needed for a bit of Dusty...
How wrong was I ? If anyone knows their minimalism, it's LFO. It's one of the few remixes they released, but it stands up as timeless. I can listen to this remix sixteen years after it was first released, and it hasn't aged one day. Very special indeed. Now why hasn't somebody got around to remixing Timezone's World Destruction yet ?
Truth be told, I hated this remix when it came out originally. I think the problem was there were a further different six mixes to chose from on the CD single (only the 808 State remix which became their "Plan 9" under a slight re-tooling is worth digging out ... but perhaps another day). I think the radical minimalism and rejection of pretty much everything in the original track apart from the occasional shout out by Afrika Baambaataa probably alienated me a little.
Blimey ... talk about taking a remix to the next level. Armand Van Helden, never one to restrain himself at the best of times, turns in a signature style remix on Genaside II's rave anthem "Narra Mine" that has all the elements we'd come to expect from Helden around 1994 - backwards wamp wamp bass, off-kilter keyboards and crisp drum beats that helped define speed garage - least we forget a movement that was largely indebted to his remixes in the first place. And then the breakbeats ricochet in.....
You have no idea the trouble that went into sourcing this mix. Most definitely worth it I hope you'll agree however. Today's video is more of the same. Although Genaside II never quite reached the commercial level they perhaps deserved, you can't help feeling that with their credibility remaining intact, they are probably not that fussed.
It's not an understatement to say I owe DJ Shadow a lot. Although it's not unusual for certain albums so soundtrack a time of life, Shadow's "Entroducing" was a little more than that for me. It proved to be the inspiration for my thesis - how many people could cite not only DJ Shadow but also Coldcut in an academic paper ?
Sometime partner in crime, but this time on the remix, Cut Chemist takes Shadow's hip-hop party trick and repeats to the nth degree in his remix below.
Please check out as much of Shadow's back cat as you can - even the later more hip-hop orientated stuff, generally badly received badly by the press at the time, has aged with repeated listening very well. I think this calls for some more DJ Shadow in today's video ...
Back like the bad penny. Got quite a bit disheartened to be honest with posts disappearing - especially as I only seem to average about 100 hits a day. Yup - I could kill the record industry with this kind of coverage.
I know nothing about today's remixer - Kriece - and you'll probably know a lot more about Richard D James than I ever could. The remix however is slight but effective, bringing one of the Aphex Twin's signature pieces more towards the dancefloor (well as much as you can with him) And they both rock.
I was trying to think of a good reason to link today's video to Mr Aphex, but to be honest I can't other than LFO and Aphex have both been on the WARP record label at various points.
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