Amazon.co.uk Review
It's hard to know where to start, with such a dazzling body of work as Warp's third Tenth Birthday celebration compilation, but suffice to say that at the turn of the century, few documents come as close to defining the international musical avant-garde as
Remixes. Label bosses Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell offered twenty-five international recording artists the chance to remix a track of their choice from Warp's entire ten year history, and such is everyone's evident enthusiasm that there's barely a bad track on here. High points, then, are hard to pick, but it's a disservice to ignore Four Tet's choppy restructuring of
Aphex Twin's sprawling ambience on the ever-awkward "Untitled", John McEntire's warm, whistling patter around
Nightmares On Wax's "Playtime" and
Mogwai's defiantly individual remix of
Link's "Arcadian", which consists of them completely ignoring the original and weaving an instrumental web of beautiful clarity. Much, much else beside, though.
--Louis Pattison
From Amazon.com
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