Let there be new light!
Remixes are annoying! But they can also charm. Nearly three decades after the heyday of the Remix, producers and live musicians are redefining the format on their own terms. In doing so, they proceed both full of respect for the original and completely disrespectfully. The main thing is that something excitingly different comes out of it.
It was the kind of treatment usually given only to kings and queens: In 1995, Michael Jackson had producer David Morales flown to Los Angeles, put him up for three weeks in the city‘s best accommodations, and paid him valuable studio time. On top of that, Morales received an amount that he has never exactly quantified, but which some suspect to be just below six figures. Jackson got three remixes for his money, which he was able to put on his single “Scream” at the time. Money, Morales openly admitted in interviews, didn‘t matter at the time. [1] From today‘s perspective, these amounts and the effort associated with the project - including tight security checks - seem downright absurd. It‘s true that remixing is still part of day-to-day business in the club scene. But it has drastically lost importance as a source of income for producers. Nevertheless, the format is currently experiencing an astonishing renaissance in creative terms.
There‘s no question that the format isn‘t where it used to be. Morales was perhaps the hottest remixer of his era, having done groundbreaking work for Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and the Pet Shop Boys. Still, he wasn‘t the only one making excellent money. Stephan Bodzin, for example, told me how he produced remixes with the trance project Kaycee like on an assembly line: „Back then, you got 10,000 marks for a remix and we’ve done two of them a week.“When hip hop experienced its global breakthrough a few years later, that was suddenly peanuts - Morales estimates that artists like P Diddy demanded just under ten times Bodzin‘s fee. Curating remixes became a profession in its own right. With Ralph Moore, for example, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe had a so-called remix consultant under contract, who advised them throughout their careers and encouraged them to commission remixes not only from a commercial point of view. This is probably one of the reasons why there is an independent remix counterpart to many PSB albums, which is inferior to the originals by little or nothing. [2] But since 2010 at the latest, when the physical record business came under fire and the music industry slid into a depression, the remix became a losing proposition on the bottom line.
The art lives on
But the often-heard claim that the art of remixing has lost its luster since then cannot be confirmed. Admittedly, the bar set by Masters at Work, for example, with their complex reworkings that make use of a mosaic of soul, funk, disco, house, RnB and world music, is high. However, these heights are still not unattainable. For his 2005 remix of Rufus Wainwright‘s „Tiergarten,“Kompakt legend Michael Mayer crafted a composition that begins as a ballad, evolves into a club track, and then flows into a hypnotic club coda. His colleague Ewan Pearson was in no way inferior when he took on Goldfrapp‘s „Ride A White Horse“a year later and made a fifteen-minute miniature symphony out of it, consisting of five interlinked parts. [3] Even among the countless remixes that see the light of day today, there are always some gems. Parisian producer Jéremy Guindo-Zegiestowski aka Bambounou cites the Bruce remix of the track „Kefi“by the mysterious UK project Das Spezial as an example: „The original is a wonderful ambient drone piece with an industrial twist. The remix, on the other hand, gets really funky and groovy. It has that element of surprise!“
Jéremy is part of the line-up that the classical record company, Deutsche Grammophon, has put together for remixes of the current Moby album „Reprise“. These pieces show how multi-layered thinking is today. „Reprise“itself was already an interpretation, poured the electronic anthems of the 90s in acoustic, sometimes even classical arrangements; therefore, the remixes are de facto electronic reworkings of acoustic reworkings of electronic tracks, some of which were reworkings of acoustic originals. The nesting could make you dizzy, but the remixes actually sound very familiar: Christian Löffler redraws „Porcelain“with softly clicking House beats, Efdemin builds a floating Techno track out of it, while Anfisa Letyago transfers the classic „Go“into surprisingly unnostalgic Electro realms. But Felsmann + Tiley probably took the cake, beaming „Extreme Ways“into a cosmos of floating pads, intense sound architecture and euphorically swelling synth staccatos.
For Felsmann + Tiley, the basic quality of a remix has hardly changed since the early days, when the main thing was to prepare a song in such a way that it would work on the dancefloor of a club: „Our music has no beats and no drums, we work with synths and voices. But if you come from a techno background, you have to be careful that this combination of electronic beats and orchestral elements doesn‘t sound too forced. Apart from that, different styles have grown together so much in the past 10-15 years that really anything goes these days.“To make it a pleasant experience for the listener, the duo says, key passages from the original must remain recognizable: „It‘s ideal if you really like a very specific key element from the original, but
The ideal is, when you really like a certain key element of the original, but not the rest of the piece. Then, you immediately have a vision for your remix. «
not the rest of the piece,“Felsmann + Tiley say, „Because then you immediately have a vision, or idea, for your remix.“
Question conventions
While the Moby remixes revive the classic remix album, the new album by Techno legend, Plastikman, with composer Chilly Gonzales, opens the door to a fascinating future. Here, in fact, the notion of a remix is fundamentally questioned, combined and enriched with concepts from interpretation, improvisation and collaboration. The tracks on the release are all based on the radical Plastikman masterpiece „Consumed“, which in 1998, pushed Acid Techno, which started out as ecstatic celebration music, into a black hole. Gonzales first encountered „Consumed“on its 25th anniversary and immediately fell in love with its otherness and radicalism. He let the music run, sat down at the piano - and suddenly had recorded three new versions in which neo-romantic, dreamlike, almost tender figures lay over the darkly throbbing beats.
For Richie Hawtin, aka Plastikman, these versions were as surprising as they were disturbing. Instead of simply rejecting them or accepting them in their existing form, he set his own conditions: He would only accept Chilly‘s pieces if he was given the opportunity to participate in them himself. And so, he opened the arrangements on his hard drive, booted up the good old machines again, and set about the microscopic fine-tuning. For two years, the two sent updates back and forth to each other, coming up with results that, in some cases, complement the album; in others, add a thrilling emotional charge. In a way, for both Hawtin and Gonzales, the process represented a remix of their work, done in real time and with participation from both sides. That‘s probably why it was at least partly as satisfying as it was grueling, as Chilly put it: „Twice while we were working on Consumed in Key, I had tears in my eyes.
„Whether what jazz drummer Makaya McCraven does in his tracks is still a remix is something even he can‘t say for sure. It all began with McCraven cutting up his live sessions on the computer and reassembling them to create idiosyncratic, strangely alienated compositions. His innovative and irreverent approach to his own music caught the attention of the glorious Blue Note label, and they gave the young musician access to the archives. This resulted in alternative versions of jazz pieces whose originals date back up to half a century. The concept is familiar from the ‚90s, when the UK project, US3, sampled its way through the classics. For McCraven, however, samples were merely the first step. In a second, for Deciphering the Message, he invited musician friends into the studio to play over the existing structures. No piece is ever finished, because the results could eventually be taken apart and reworked again. The approach is as simple as it is inspiring; and it works, above all, because McCraven, as the title of his album immediately suggests, does not approach the classics disrespectfully, but tries to really internalize them - the complete antithesis of the earlier heyday of remixing, when at some point there was little more than a rhythmic element or a few vocal scraps left of the original.
It is practically inconceivable that the same sums will ever flow again as in the „Scream“days. But maybe that‘s not wrong at all. David Morales probably made his best remixes for Mariah Carey, on which he earned far less, but which offered a true playground for his multi-layered interests. To this day, it is one of the biggest omissions of that time that the two did not go into the studio for a joint album. The fact that people speculated about it at all is solely due to the probably unique quality of all great remixes: to let the well-known shine in a completely new light. ⸬