Aidan Baker, "Remixes"

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06 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Very little on this eleven track remix project moves me to endorse it. The prospect of Gruntsplatter and Troum remixing Aidan Baker's varied catalogue is exciting, but many of these revisions add up to little more than frivolous games played with choice sampling material.

Arcolepsy

I figured that Baker's varied output would provide opportunity for each of these remixers to reconstruct his songs altogether and come up with something new and exciting. It'd be easy, I thought, to add all kinds of new material to his songs while retaining some elements of the originals. "Baker's musical palette is practically begging for reconstruction," I said, but evidently few people are sure of what to do with his music. According to the notes that come in this handmade package, each of the remixers used entire albums as sources for the music. Be that as it may, many of these songs are so boringly flat and dull that I can't imagine any one of them using more than just a few minutes of one song on each album. Both "Cloning (1 Blood Made 2 Remix)" and "Interweaver (Jazzy Mix)" attempt to add new beats to Baker's music, using his guitar drones and other electronic blurs to make music that adds up to nothing new or exciting at all. It's as though the remixers felt they could cover up their own lack of inspiration by disguising Baker's music as something deserving of washed up drum beats and club treatment. The Orb did this ten years ago, but I was excited about their albums. This is chill out music, something to ignore while doing the laundry or reading a book.

In some cases the remixers attempted to expand on themes that Baker had established in the source material. Building Castles Out of Matchsticks remixed music from Cicatrice, an album built around a theme of "mechanical/insectoid" guitar work. The drum breaks that the group added to the song certainly bring out a fluttering, nightmarish quality reminiscent of giant robot insects flying about, but there's just not enough flare and excitement in the music to make it stand out. It sounds, more or less, like a textbook example of how to make fast, inhuman beats fit in with any kind of music whatsoever. It sounds as though everyone must've thrown their hands up in the air in frustration because they weren't quite sure how to mold something interesting and musical out of music that is inherently shapeless, or at least constantly changing. In most cases it seems as though everyone said to themselves, "throw in some beats, that'll solve the problem!" Gruntsplatter and the Blameshifter both prove it is possible to play with Baker's music and leave the percussion at home.

Both used multiple sources as sound material for their remixes and both try to confront Baker's music without turning it into an electronic dance session. Their remixes are dense, layered songs breaking and popping with melodies, bending with inconsistencies, and constantly evolving. In other words, the good remixes on this disc don't mess with Baker's style so much as they attempt to shape it in new ways. Gruntsplatter's remix is especially involving, using five sources and mixing them expertly into a wave of sound pictures that slowly fall apart and fade away into a buzzing pulse that consumes the end of the track. It sounds more like a song unto itself than any of the other remixes on the disc because it is so imaginative and varied, not because it added some beats or rearranged a few sounds here and there so as to make a melody that didn't exist on the original album. When Gruntsplatter meshes two different pieces of sound together it is a convincing marriage that doesn't violate Baker's compositional style. Troum's remix, though using only one source, succeeds because it doesn't try to re-imagine the music entirely, placing it in a strange setting it could never belong in. Troum seem to let the original guide them on a new path, but they don't attempt to punch holes in the music and turn the whole affair into something it was never meant to be. They took caution and didn't attempt to relocate Baker's music altogether, they simply allowed it to move and play in new ways. It is no easy task remixing a drone-based work, but they do it and they do it well.

Despite the spattering of bad remixes on this CD, the three or four good tracks on here are stunningly good and represent what the possibilities of a remix still hold. The best material on the disc reshapes Baker's music and places it in a new setting, but without going overboard. The addition of beats and melodies doesn't make for a satisfying remix of Baker's music. It takes a little more imagination than that and the ability to play with sound as living thing and not just some source to add beats beneath. Beyond that, it takes the ability to imagine something new in something to inherently bare and it shows on this disc that such a task is much harder than it might seem. Of the eleven artists on this disc, only four passed the test with any degree of success.

samples:

Aidan Baker, "Remixes"

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