Year of the Remix
a couple of months ago i was really tempted to write a post about how ewan pearson had just been on fire, completely owning this year remix-wise. i held off though, and i'm kind of glad i did... i was kind of obsessed with some of his remixes for a while, and i get kind of myopic when i'm like that. but i was thinking about him again while listening to his new mix (sci.fi.hi.fi. vol 1), and as good as he's been—which is quite good—there have been so so many great remixes, and remixers, that i've heard this year that that hypothetical lauding seems completely ridiculous. i mean, just look at the list:
people who've consistently dropped bombs this year/last year: jacques lu cont et al, justice, trentmøller, eulberg, vitalic, richard x, rex the dog, tiefschwarz, linstrøm & prins t, m.a.n.d.y. / booka etc, freeform five, the dahlbacks, moonbootica, koze, mayer, superpitcher...
good god damn! and that's just the high points, my prospective best songs of the year list is nearly half remixes.
question: how does the remix culture of dance music conflict with/validate the rockist/autuerist aesthetic? or to specify the question further: does the idea of remixing strengthen the idea of a definitive take on a song, or fundamentally refute it? at one point i would have said that it totally trashed it, but now i am not so sure...
people who've consistently dropped bombs this year/last year: jacques lu cont et al, justice, trentmøller, eulberg, vitalic, richard x, rex the dog, tiefschwarz, linstrøm & prins t, m.a.n.d.y. / booka etc, freeform five, the dahlbacks, moonbootica, koze, mayer, superpitcher...
good god damn! and that's just the high points, my prospective best songs of the year list is nearly half remixes.
question: how does the remix culture of dance music conflict with/validate the rockist/autuerist aesthetic? or to specify the question further: does the idea of remixing strengthen the idea of a definitive take on a song, or fundamentally refute it? at one point i would have said that it totally trashed it, but now i am not so sure...
COMMENTS:
said: to be clear, i am definitely NOT talking about covers, they don't have nearly the presence in dance music releases that remixes do.
remix = anything released that calls itself a remix/mix/dub etc, with the original artist and song explicitly credited.
two examples on opposite ends of the "resemblence to the original" spectrum that i would definitely consider to be remixes, regardless of that (obvious) definition, would be daft punk's remix of franz's take me out (which basically just tweaks the eq and adds some minimal effects), and that aphex twin remix where allegedly he forgot to do it and when someone showed up for it at his studio demanding the mix he just grabbed a random DAT off the self and played dumb.
said: Alright, consider me chilled.
I think I was misinterpreting your question, but I would say that remixes can certainly be rockist, but that they don't have to be. If I was a rockist, I might say that the remix was the *only* version of the song worth hearing, but as a non-rockist, I could just consider it another interpretation that is also worth hearing.
said: let's try this again...
to first order, remixing a song flagrantly thumbs it's nose at a rockist "singular take"/"pure vision of the artist" etc; where there was once only one there are now many. the original artist can no longer argue nearly as strongly that everything he laid down was as intended and part of a perfect whole, where if any element were changed it would lose it's perfection etc etc (just thowing this straw man arguement out there as an example, don't take it too seriously). the point is that the situation has changed. what the situation has changed to, and how it relates to the politics of rockism (if it does at all) is a more thorny question.
so remixing obviously refutes the idea of a singular take, but what about a definitive one? dance is a very functionalist genre (much more so than, for example, rock), so the most effective take is very easy to gauge: it's what get's people to move.
but then again i suppose many remixes aren't directly competeing with the original song for playing time, as a lot of the time a remix serves to "genrefy" a track. for example among the many and varied remixes of royksopp's "what else is there", one is very k-housey, another is electrohousey, one is whatever genre jlc defines, etc etc, variations on theme...
the idea of a definitive take is a very powerful one, at least for me, even if i don't want it to be. i guess in theory if i had all the time in the world it would be nice to hear all the different versions of a song, but when i'm hunting down, for example, tracks from the paradise garage's top 100, i definitely go after the mix they had listed and none other. so i think the idea of a definitive version of a song is strengthened when the idea of remixing is introduced. the question that remains is: is this just as rockist as the "singular take/vision" that many people (strawmen?) infer from the percieved "artistic intent" of, say, a track on a rock album.
enough for now. thoughts?
said: what happened to all the other messages that were here? i never got a chance to read them.
said: they were so tangential as to be off-topic, and somewhat unpleasant (both on my and mat's part), so i decided to delete them and hope for some better answers.
said: riff raff on remixes
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