Old Music of the New Era

Three decades have already passed since the American producer Tom Moulton recorded the first dance remix and thereby entered music history. This industry has long since become a cultural stratum in its own right, living through its ups, downs and shifts in the prevailing trends.

In the eighties, remixes carried a purely utilitarian function - dance versions of songs by Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Madonna and disco groups from the Salsoul label differed from the originals only in their extended instrumental breaks - these variations were made for clubs and had a single purpose behind them: to be DJ-friendly. The thing is that pop music, i.e. tracks with an abundance of instruments, vocals and a pronounced melody (and it was exactly this kind that played in clubs back then), is devilishly hard to mix. Here there's no getting by without sections specially prepared for DJs, and drums and bass. The second problem with disco and new-wave records was that the drummers on them played far from perfectly, and in order to "fit" their rhythms into a DJ set, the drums had to be aligned beforehand. Such versions often came out not even on singles but on special compilations produced by the so-called "remix services" - one of these, for example, was an outfit called Razormaid.

Little by little, by the end of the eighties the remix turned from a purely technical and, if you like, engineering product into a creative one. The remixer added more and more of his own "creativity" to the version, often reworking the whole arrangement in his own way. Among the first to succeed at this were the house pioneers The Beatmasters and Madonna's future producer William Orbit. It even happened that their remixes became the main versions on singles - they were put into radio rotation and had video clips shot for them - as happened, for instance, with The Shamen single "Boss Drum".

The heyday of the remix came in the nineties - often artists' singles turned out to be more interesting than their albums. Björk, Depeche Mode, Madonna, The Cure - they were all selective and extremely precise in choosing whose hands to place their fresh songs in. The "surgeons" (and here there were electronic artists of the most varied genres and calibres, from FSOL and Orb to Paul Oakenfold, Underworld and Richie Hawtin) in turn didn't let them down, bringing their "patients" a new audience and often winning rapturous applause from the old fans too.

There were also situations where remixes utterly eclipsed the originals - who, for example, remembers the original of Humate's track "Love Stimulation"? Whereas Paul van Dyk's remix is considered an immortal classic. Or try to recall the original of the song "Yeke Yeke", which, in the interpretation by the group Hardfloor, only the deaf could have failed to hear.

The most recent example of this kind is the song "Four To The Floor" by the group Starsailor, which marched across the radio stations in a remix by Stuart Price. Imagine the surprise of those who, having taken the bait of a rousing little electro-disco dance number, bought the album and found dreary Britpop on it.

Lately, however, the situation has suddenly begun to change dramatically. If in the nineties danceability was a pleasant but entirely optional bonus for a remix (thus, for instance, one of the most in-demand remixers was the Austrian downtempo duo Kruder & Dorfmeister), then in the 2000s singles frequently began to turn into a utilitarian set of club variants as alike as two peas in a pod. There are many reasons for this, and one of the main ones is the notorious crisis of the recording industry. A single is, after all, a commercial product aimed at promoting the main track. All right, one good remix can pass for the "radio" version, but to keep alternative variants there as pure art (of which there were always plenty with Björk, for example) is a luxury. A remix has to perform an applied function, in this case - to help the artist's tracks get played in clubs. And while, say, Sasha "Apparat" Ring can well afford, out of love for art, to "summon" Telefon Tel Aviv onto a record, and the well-known "fighter against the industry" Trent Reznor goes so far as to invite the neoclassical Kronos Quartet and the ambient experimentalist Fennesz onto a remix album (in both cases the result is beyond all praise), the majors play by their own harsh rules.

The ideal option for a major label is to land a famous DJ as remixer. The authors themselves are, after all, sure to play their own remixes in their sets, and they'll get powerful support from their friends and followers too. The same reason lies behind the abundance of similar versions (a tech-house-style remix, an electro-house-style remix and so on). To fit easily into a set, each remix has to conform strictly to the format. That's why on the singles of those same Depeche Mode, Barry Adamson and Air were replaced by Booka Shade, Tiga and Alter Ego.

The first problem with the general "decline in remix quality" is that whereas those same Orbit or even Stuart Price are, after all, pop producers used to dealing with vocals and varied "instrumentation", someone like Octagon Man is a composer, not an arranger, and he simply doesn't need any of that. He writes minimalist music and works predominantly with the rhythm section. Hence the remixes made on the principle of "one's own track plus scraps of the original vocal scattered here and there". That said, it would also be wrong to blame the monotony of remixes entirely on a lack of producer skills - one need only look, for instance, at how the output of James "Unkle" Lavelle has changed, sliding over a few years from intricate break-rock into monotonous house.

Evidently fashion, too, plays no small part here. Problem number two is that a musician in demand in this capacity receives hundreds of offers a year and does several dozen remixes - and that's not counting recording his own tracks! Need one add after that that the same Price is not infrequently guilty of "churning them out"?

There is no cause for general pessimism just yet, however - as usual, it's the young who save the situation. A young artist has a vital stake in the result of his own labour - a successful remix is, for him, a chance to build a serious career. Justice's dizzying success began precisely thanks to a remix (their "homemade" version of the Simian song "We Are Your Friends" shot up to astronomical heights, even grabbing an MTV Video Music Award), and the duo Simian Mobile Disco likewise started out precisely as a "remix service".

And if you turn your gaze towards nu-rave, an utterly astonishing fact comes to light - the genre itself was essentially usurped by those who remixed the first wave of nu-ravers. Originally it was Klaxons and Shitdisco who were counted as nu-rave, that is, indie-rockers in colourful T-shirts. But as soon as the genre reached the clubs, what played there was not the originals at all, but new versions by those same Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, Boys Noize and Hot Chip. As a result, this sound and the term grew so attached to each other that today even the likes of Daft Punk are reckoned among the nu-ravers.

A curious picture is to be observed with dubstep too, and here, as was to be expected, the anonymous Briton Burial has succeeded more than others. He already builds his compositions out of scraps of other people's samples, like a fanciful patchwork quilt. So why not apply the technique to material that the authors provide voluntarily? The result can be observed on the singles of Bloc Party and Thom Yorke.

Moving along the same path is another virtuoso of unconventional sampledelia, Kieran Hebden (Four Tet). Kieran amazes not so much by his ability to deftly rework any track, as by the fact that, having turned the original into a ragged, abrasive mush, he manages not only to make the remix thoroughly danceable but also to preserve the spirit of the original. The best example here is what Hebden did with Nathan Fake's single "You Are Here".

Perhaps the most interesting, but as yet not fully developed, niche is the "reverse remix" - where the song's "filling" remains but the entire arrangement is rewritten, often into something stylistically opposite. If Björk's foray in this direction, handing over the multitracks of her "Isabel" to the metal band Carcass, looked like a trial of the pen, then the experiments in this direction by the much-mentioned Depeche Mode had a downright crushing success - Enjoy The Silence, re-arranged by Linkin Park member Mike Shinoda, "shot its way" up into the pop charts. The interpretation of the song "Halo" by Goldfrapp, tucked away on a single, also surprised with the freshness of its thinking - not only did Alison and Will turn synth-pop into exotic cabaret, but Miss Goldfrapp even sang the backing vocals on that version.

In short, if one is to sum up, a single conclusion suggests itself - in creating a remix the key becomes the balance between the musical ability to "speak" (i.e. to bring one's own ideas into the version) and to "listen" (i.e. to feel the original and build the remix around it, rather than fitting samples after the fact onto an already finished track of one's own). And, of course, away with utilitarianism and rigid format constraints.