Warp 10+3 Remixes [Compilation]

Once upon a time, a remix was an attempt by a producer to make a track more danceable--to pump up the bass, drop an infectious tambourine loop over the steady 4/4 rhythm, and add some echo to spark the crowd's buzz. But in the hands of the Intelligent Dance Music crowd--the style, pioneered by Warp Records, of applying dance-floor technologies to armchair music--the remix took on the in-joke mentality of a postmodern literary trickster. Tracks--not songs, tracks (if they started off as songs they inevitably got turned into tracks)--were pulled inside out, pushed through a filter that replaced beauty with noise and wrung it out to dry. The two-CD remix portion of Warp's 10th anniversary series takes this aesthetic as far as it can possibly go. This is contrariness squared. Oval applies his patented skipping-and-stripping CD methodology to Squarepusher's jittery drill and bass. Four Tet splices his disembodied reconstruction of a jazz rhythm section onto one of Aphex Twin's oddly effectless ambient works. Jim O'Rourke subjects one of Autechre's stop-start sonic mazes to his obsessively detail-oriented studio savvy. The result certainly has a hothouse quality to it, but hey, when you're not out on the dance floor, you've gotta work up a sweat somehow. --Jeff Salamon

Volume Two of the Smash Remix Compilation Exclusive to Japan.