Seattle-based electronic producer Chris H. Jones first emerged back in 2007 with his debut album, Deciduous Flood Plains as Yard and two years on this accompanying remix album (curiously attributed by Concrete Plastic to ‘Various Artists’) sees the nine IDM centred tracks from that aforementioned record being reconfigured in a distinctly more tech-oriented and dancefloor-friendly style by an impressive cast of remixers, including Anders Ilar and Fisk Industries (returning the favour for Yard’s recent reworking of ‘Brassica’). While I have to confess that for the most part I was previously unfamiliar with the majority of the remixers gathered here, the end results manage to consistently be both impressive and diverse. Arctic Hospital immediately kick things off with a robotically-flexing tech-house reworking of ‘Cascade’ that nods towards Audion’s dark pneumatic grooves amidst the shimmering background synthscapes, before Anders Ilar takes ‘Portabello’ out on a glittering deep-electro trajectory that smears dubbed-out melodic chords against the brittle-sounding rhythms, to spectacular effect.
Elsewhere, Let’s Go Outside return things to the throbbing tech-y darkness with their sinister retake on ‘Under The Bonnet’, a powering direction neatly followed up by Rootsix’s muscular, vaguely proggy reworking of ‘Synthetic Waves.’ It’s Fisk Industries however who really offers up one of the biggest highlights here, eschewing techno bpms in favour of taking ‘Canopy’ on a deep, dark hiphop / electro journey that threads horror-movie orchestration with sampled tablas and clicking programmed rhythms, while Eric McIntyre bends and reshuffles ‘Bees’ into a headscrambling blur of fractured breakers’ grooves on his ‘Oligolecty mix’, Celer’s minimalist ambient reshaping of ‘New Beginnings’ providing the perfect closing antidote if your nerves are getting a wee bit scrambled at this point by the former’s DSP-smashed breakbeats. An extremely impressive remix album that’s well worth seeking out.
Chris Downton
