“Archangel
(Boy 8-Bit’s Simple Remix)”
by Burial
(MP3)
As someone who, as a rule, likes desiccated graininess over pilfered
and/or programmed beats, I’ve somehow never been knocked out by Burial
the way a lot of my colleagues have—with some exceptions like
“Ghost Hardware,” he’s struck me as akin to dried pumpernickel. But it
wasn’t until I recently came across this few-months-old reworking of
the key track from last year’s Untrue via a friend’s Muxtape
that I realized how tangy and effortless it could sound. The secret:
Fellow Londoner Boy 8-Bit switches the beat to a swift 4/4 without
losing any of the original’s rhythmic skip, not so much transforming it
as juicing what was already there. (Boy 8-Bit’s own recent “Fog Bank”
is also recommended.)
“Les Gans
(Philip Sherburne Remix)”
by Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts
(Musique Risquée)
Since Philip Sherburne is a friend as well as a fellow music writer,
I’m sure to open myself to charges of logrolling by recommending this
track, his remix of an airy 12-inch by a talented Montreal producer.
Fine, then, I’m a logroller, because this kept coming up on the iTunes
folder in which I keep potential column items, and I kept inching the
volume till it could inch no more. The original wasn’t a banger by any
means, and neither is the rework: Sherburne concentrates on a couple
overlapping breathy-buzzy sax parts that do and don’t do what you’re
expecting them to, and he imbues the already dazed original with extra
dizziness. The feel is light and delicate, though it’s less like a
feather floating on air than a moving pinball that keeps stopping off
to sightsee. This it does for nearly nine minutes—not that you’ll
notice time going by or anything.
“Paper Planes (DFA Remix)”
by M.I.A.
(Interscope)
A bass line from a Berlitz learn-funk-in-minutes cassette, a piano
coda played by two left thumbs, vocals mismatching here by a hair’s
breadth and there by a drawstring’s—I’m almost convinced that
this unmitigated disaster is a piss-take, as in “Let’s throw some
random garbage out there and see if the lemmings wander off the cliff
to it.” If so, congratulations are in order: James Murphy and Maya
Arulpragasam must have really gotten sick of winning all those
critics polls. And if it’s not, well, watch out for falling lemmings.
