Lotus Remix)”
by Kanye West
(MP3)
Steven Ellison had a hell of a 2008. The 25-year-old Southern
Californian who records as Flying Lotus issued Los Angeles, an
album of spacey, fluttering, teasingly bent beat-head catnip that ended
up on a bunch of year-end best-of lists. He also got some attention for
the L.A. EP 1 and 2 x 3 12-inches he put out (the second
is maybe the best remix collection released last year, while the third
is allegedly on its way) and capped it with a bustling set for BBC’s
Essential Mix that aired November 29. But he snuck out of 2008’s
back door with this remix of one of the year’s big, semicontroversial
tunes, which was on blogs a week before Christmas.
Whether you think Kanye’s song is a new peak or T-Pain gone
emo-and-lame is up to you; I like it as a single but find the album
tiresome. But knowing it already definitely helps you hear Ellison’s
version as an alternate-universe version of the original, rather than a
marketing device for a dance floor different from the kinds Kanye
serves, which is the usual root of remixes. Ellison basically makes it
over into a woolly, clanking dubstep track: the snares like coughing
pipes in an abandoned building, the low-buzzing drone surrounding the
words like the one room in that building whose fixtures still work. It
sounds as desolate as Kanye claims to feel, and it makes the Auto-Tune
almost a nonissue—that device makes the vocalist sound like he’s
swaddled under pillows anyway; now everything else sounds like that,
too. Maybe Mr. West ought to hire Mr. Ellison to coproduce his next
album.
by Tanlines
(Young Turks)
This is one of those records that seems to have emerged fully formed
from the smoke-filled id of its creators. In very light, clear, faint
falsetto, coconspirators Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm of Brooklyn, New
York, chant “flowers” a lot as background noise for delicate, instantly
ingratiating melds: of congas and steady electro pulse (with
appropriately tinny, truncated “snare” noises); close-plucked rhythm
guitar that could have come off Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and two-finger synth riffs that could have come off the first Depeche
Mode album; the kind of cool, cloistered feel of the structurally
similar “Cable Dazed,” by similarly DFA-inspired Brooklynites Invisible
Conga People, and something a lot airier and more mid-’80s. I’d like to
hear whatever else they want to offer. 