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On the face of it eight tracks seems pretty meagre fare for a remix
album, even if the remix team is the celebrated DFA. Insert the disc into
your player and a new fear arises, the realisation that this still means
seventy minutes of music. How can a good remix possibly sustain interest
over ten minutes or more?
Happily in this case the answer is easy to attain. The mammoth
reworkings of Tiga, Goldfrapp and UNKLE are all
unexpectedly tightly structured, despite making a small album's worth of
music between them. Even in the case of the In A State remix, nearly a
quarter of an hour long, DFA secure a hypnotically trancy piece of music -
a haunting, out of body experience. For Tiga the approach is totally
different, the harmony static the whole way through but as the tension and
textural layers build the effect is thrilling, the vocals eventually
swamped by a whoosh of synthesized noise.
One aspect of the DFA remixing style that sets them apart is the feeling
that there is actually someone playing the bass and drums, not just
channelling them through a computer. The scattergun approach to some of the
drum fills and the lithe basslines draw much from late 1970s Manchester,
but combined with the studio trickery up top secure a distinctive sound,
with a captivating listen guaranteed.
The final versions tend to be far removed from their original
counterparts. Junior Senior's Shake Your Coconuts is impossibly lean
and funky, dancing to totally different harmonies. N.E.R.D. get a
bass sound made of pure elastic, while a real revelation awaits listeners
to Nine Inch Nails' Hand That Feeds, a hip swinging piece of funk
with an irresistible four to the floor groove. Hot Chip's Colours,
meanwhile, seems to have been coated in gold leaf, a softly meditative
vocal dressed in elaborate keyboard clothing.
The only mix that doesn't quite seem to nail it is the Goldfrapp,
impeccably constructed yet somehow not quite adding up to the sum of its
parts.
This is a fine second volume though, serving further notice of DFA's
production talent, as if that were needed! It's an indication of why DJs
should drop their records and not just their name.
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