Upon its release last year, Copenhagen-based electronic producer Anders Trentemoller’s third album ‘Lost’ seemed to have a slightly polarising effect on longtime listeners, as it saw him moving further into guitar-dominated song structures, alongside an impressive cast of collaborators including Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead, The Raveonettes and Low. A year on, this accompanying volume ‘Lost Reworks’ offers up a remix companion collection to ‘Lost’, and if anything it has its feet planted far more firmly on the dancefloor than the album that inspired it. Rather than enlisting a cast of high-profile artists to contribute remixes though, Trentemoller’s opted to supply a fair share of the reworkings here himself, alongside a slew of lesser known names including Toydrum, Unkwon and Pinknoizu.
Things certainly open on a propulsive club tip with Trentemoller’s own reworking of ‘River Of Life’, which shears away the more jagged surf-punk guitar riffs of the original in favour of a streamlined electroclash chassis, the dark swelling synth pads that shift into the foreground towards the end calling to mind contemporary Gary Numan given a considerable more electro-tech kick. Toydrum (aka UNKLE’s Pablo Clement alongside James Griffith) meanwhile turn ‘Come Undone’ into a stomping overdriven rock / beats hybrid that sees galloping tribal drums merging with fuzzed-out guitars and distorted vocals that certainly calls to mind shades of Clement’s ‘main’ band.
Elsewhere, Jenny Wilson’s remix of ‘Candy Tongue’ takes things off into widescreen territory as detailed layers of polyrhythmic percussion roll beneath eerie Egyptian-sounding instrumentation and Wilson’s own soaring delay-heavy vocals, before Trentemoller’s own ‘Club’ remix of ‘Deceive’ offers up what’s easily the most main room-primed tech-house excursion on offer here. It’s a slight pity that Trentemoller’s opted to include no less than three different mixes (each) of both ‘Come Undone’ and ‘Deceive’, as it can’t help but introduce elements of repetition here. As a more dance-centred remix companion to ‘Lost’ though, this is pretty solid.
