Share, Remix, Reuse

Lemme tell you a lil' anecdote. As you may know I'm prepping to go to art university,now my favourite medium is the digital one which brings a whole bunch of copyright trouble with it. That's where you get creative and look for images and video or whatever that has either been given out as public domain by the author, or things that simply didn't get copyright renewed. That's where the title comes in, see there's a whole community dedicated to making art more accessible to people by compiling massive archives of material that is free from copyright. And I admire that because creativity shouldn't be limited by what materials you have access to, and also because it's a very similar principle I'd like to see applied to blogs, we're not filthy pirates, we just wanna share some tunes.



And this got me thinking. See, there's a recent trend in art for remixing work through stuff like art jams and whatever, and that's a lot like how remixing (in the musical sense) got started. So with that in mind I cobbled together a list of remixes to share with you lot! Daedelus' revamp of 1983 starts off fairly plain, following the original version quite closely until about 1:40 where it gets chopped and spliced in all sorts of ways



Let me take you back to 2008, when dubstep wasn't a dirty word and it wasn't all about who can put the most bass on a track. I'd just gotten my mits on FabricLive 37 and this track was on it, but being a compilation it was about a minute long, I stumbled across it again earlier this year and it's still as good as ever. There's something about old school dubstep remixes of reggae and dub that is just really special, something this remix hits perfectly.





There's a couple of official hip hop remixes of the classic that is Clint Eastwood out of the two I have, this one's the best. The backing is actually well reworked, instead of just being a loop from the original track and Phi Life's lyrics are great throughout, they're clever and while it may take a while for them to come in, once he's off he hardly ever stops laying them down until the last minute or so.



Back to more conventional electronic remixes, I posted one from The Thin White Duke not too long ago and mentioned that they're all fairly similar structure wise and here's another example. Röyksopp's What Else Is There? was a pretty big hit at the time but it wasn't suited well to the dancefloor, and that's where the Duke comes in. Unlike the Felix remix I posted earlier this one stays pretty consistently quality throughout, no doubt helped by Karin Dreijer's sublime vocals.



Here's one that comes a little out of leftfield, slotted on the end of Ladytron's 604 is this remix. Now after an album full of retro synths and homages to the synthpop scene, the last thing you expect to hear is an instrumental reworking in the vein of tracks like The Knife's Vegetarian Restaurant. But that's exactly what this is, and it's pretty swell. I actually didn't realise how long it is, I could've sworn it was only about 3 minutes but nope, it's actually 6:13. It's kept fairly fresh throughout despite only being variants on the same 4 elements or so within the mix.



Gonna leave ya again now, next I'm probably gonna find where I left off with the Warped posts and hopefully get them finished up. It'll only have taken me nearly two years to get through it all then! consider it me making it up to you for not doing an anniversary post this year on the 9th :)

Logging Off,
-Claude Van Foxbat