Lots of people dislike remix discs, and they tend to get quite angry about them, seeing them as gross attempts at market capitalisation or musical exercises in vanity. I’m not one of those people. It’s perhaps because the first remix albums I ever heard broke my mind. They were Mogwai’s Kicking a Dead Pig and Pluroman’s Bit Sand Riders. At the time I’d never heard the original albums that these mixes came from, but I could tell that both of these albums loaded up their remixers with peers, not anonymous hit makers from a dance music background, and seemed to possess a brief of letting the remixer do whatever the hell they wanted What I enjoyed about both of these albums is the clear freedom that the remixers had, where no longer worried about genre constraints, their own legacy, or even an audience, they had the freedom to experiment, to take massive risks and the by product was the development of a whole new form. It was some of the craziest music that I’d ever heard, and to be honest I cared little about who did what to whom, I just wanted to bask in the remarkable sounds and mind-bending forms. This is what I think about when I think about remix albums.
Edinburgh duo Graveyard Tapes released White Rooms last year, and I haven’t heard it. It doesn’t matter, because the remixers provide glimpses of what the album could be like, and it’s fascinating attempting to piece together the fragments to create your own impression of the whole. It’s helped (or perhaps hindered) by the fact that on this eight-track album there are two pieces, tackled twice, yet they’re approached in such disparate manner’s that it doesn’t give much to go on. There’s a few high profile names on here, such as Lost Tribe stalwart William Ryan Fritch, who’s own musical evolution continues to amaze, as well as Benoit Pioulard, Dag Rosenqvist (Jasper TX), as well as newly signed Lost Tribe artists Western Skies Motel and Mute Forest.
It’s an eclectic and endlessly inventive mix of sounds and approaches. There isn’t a weak moment. It’s either overwhelmingly beautiful or crafting a whole new genre that never existed before – though its often both at the same time. There’s an abundance of ideas here. Fritch’s mix in particular is quite funny, because it’s not a mix at all – it’s a cover version in his own precocious slightly hyper, vaguely melancholic style that’s pretty heavy on the percussion. There’s some really beautiful elongated moments of gentle ambience here too, such as Fieldhead’s mix of “Ruins,” as well as Western Skies Motel’s take of “I’m on Fire,” slowly building tension over a mildly repetitive bass line and searing strings and piano.
The highlight is Bastardgeist, creating something that feels entirely new, mashing tempos, crashing worlds, creating some kind of high energy melancholy ambient funk that seems to exist equally on the dance floor and for headphone listening at exactly the same time. I’m not sure how he has worked this peculiar alchemy, but his mix of the track, “Sometimes the Sun Doesn’t Want to be Photographed” is impossible to get out of your head.
