The 2kDozen 500: #139 - Battles, "Dross Glop"

So this is the remix of Gloss Drop, which I also haven't heard yet. I suppose I should've listened to this as a double header; but I'm not so suck on that, Darth Reader! I shall have to determine exactly how cochlea-some this album is of its own semi-decontextualised accord. (Can you be in accord without context? A question for post-modern diplomats everywhere.)

There are some very promising names involved. Shabazz Palaces being the only ones I know more than a little about. Quite like Battles too - without being too excited or in love with them or anything. Played a great gig one ATP, but then they've played a lot of ATPs of late.

An early favourite is The Alchemist's mix of "Futura" - all helter-skeltering doom-laden organ, moody old-skool drum breaks and the occasional malevolent klunk. Very nice aural furniture at a very unhappy seaside. No further business is necessary. "Inchworm" piles on the techno psychedelia and is also very strong - Silent Servant doing the remixification on that beauty. Kingding Ray's remix of "Toddler" gives it a Kubrickian power that chews at the corner of my mind's eye and gives me tiny shivers of fear through the earphones. A good listen. I'll insert a daft idea about gothic, dread-hinged space exploration, arching out from the centre of an arachnid empire, when it occurs to me later.

Not so big on the Gang Gang Dance rework of "Ice Cream" - touch too quirky after all the sleek style that went before. "Rolls Bayce" has some galaxial swirl, steel drum bands drifting across the milky absence of space. Space again: it's a powerful metaphor, especially considering the fact that space is utterly silent. What does our imagination expect to hear out there?

"My Machines" is the Gary Numan track. And that's a genius title for a Gary Numan collaboration. He can look out across the huge factories of electronic music and rightfully extend his hand over them with a Biblical sense of fatherhood. The electro Abraham. (Maybe Kraftwerk can be Gabriel, Uriel, Michael and the other archangel?) It has that kind of scale too, despite the disco bounce and squealing strings. There's a sense of the cathedral about it. A cathedral with a massive robot brain for a bishop, with all the syphillis and crazed worldview of a normal bishop, but added burble. And mammoths with gout for thurifers.

Honourable mention too to The Field's remix of "Sweetie & Shag". It gives me a vision of an orchestra made up of car factory robots, whirring and dancing to their internal rhythms. Bit of a noise like a dimensionally distant alarm clock persuading it with foggy violence to climb into consciousness.

Would seem a shame to try and de-splice all this gorgeous DNA, wouldn't it? Maybe I won't bother with the original.

Rating: Creamy out of Galaxy