- Four charming remixes of a dusty dance floor maestro.
- A remix usually starts with the stems. That is to say, the audio from the original track broken down into its constituent parts: drums, bass, chords, and so on. For reasons that aren't explained, the producers reworking STL's Constructive: No Words Required didn't get the stems. That leaves them with the stereo mix—the finished audio file that gets released into the world. Remixing from this demands greater ingenuity. It's tricky to isolate sounds while others are playing simultaneously, so you're left with only snippets of extractable audio. It might be this constraint that gives the finished remixes their charm. Furtive and obscure, they duck and weave rather than delivering direct blows.
Take, for instance, the two Juniper dubs of "Haze & Kraze." The original is STL in wonky deep sea mode, his melodies waterlogged with spooky dissonance. Unable to let these synth parts unspool fully in their two "dubs," the meandyou. duo extract snippets of them to use as sputtering riffs somewhere between bassline and chord. The rough 'n' ready quality is complemented by the fast-paced drums (Juniper have perfected this bouncy groove in their originals). On the standout "Dub 1", synth ripples hint at the original's lead lines without fully stating them. Jonas Friedlich's version of "Hide & Seek" also flickers with unease, shuffling between electro and dub techno in the opening section. In the end, a booming breakbeat solves the argument with an unexpected shot of UK swagger. Fold sounds more comfortable on his version of the same track, where a blissed-out broken techno vibe mirrors the sound of his Well Street label.
TracklistA1 Haze & Kraze (Juniper Dub 1)
A2 Haze & Kraze (Juniper Dub 2)
B1 Hide & Seek (Fold Dub)
B2 Hide & Seek (Jonas Friedlich Dub)