A Year of Music

Whoever put together those Thom Yorke remix singles had a good ear. Maybe it was Thom, maybe it was longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, maybe it was some anonymous A&R person at XL. Whatever the case, each EP has its own sensibility and stands alone.

(I'm sure the whole set will eventually be released as one of those "remix collections" I always regard with a mild, queasy horror in stores; too much of my impressionable youth was spent listening to crappy industrial and techno remixes to ever fully trust the concept of a remix album. That's too bad, because in this case I think the 3 remix EPs add up to something more interesting than the album being remixed, even though trying to sequence them into a cohesive single-disc collection is going to be challenging.)

Anyway, the EP currently playing features a Four Tet remix of "Atoms for Peace" that contributes to the gradual erosion of my conviction that Four Tet is yet another crappy Kruder & Dorfmeister clone (previous hat tip to Four Tet: including Quickspace Supersport's "Superplus", the best song Stereolab never recorded, on Four Tet's DJ Kicks mix). It's loose-limbed and yearning, and has a considerably lighter tone than the original.

It's coupled with two separate remixes by Cristian Vogel, who can release a new Super_Collider album whenever he and Jamie Liddell feel like it, because Liddell has demonstrated to my satisfaction that his white-boy soul act is not nearly as fun without Vogel's eccentric, rubbery basslines backing him up, and the second Super_Collider album, while not nearly as fun as the first, is way better than no Super_Collider at all. The Vogel remixes here feature two entirely different takes on Yorke's "Black Swan", the former a pensive electronic haze, the latter being more beat-oriented and sketchy. I prefer the first, but the second has those rubbery basslines I love so much.