The collection of music you're about to squeeze through your temporal lobe is not comprised of your standard 4/4 dance remixes. Unlike traditional remix records, these thirteen pieces are fully reconstructed re-imaginings of tunes from Coffin Prick's debut LP “Laughing” (Sophomore Lounge, 2023). Built from the e-ground up as they were initially recorded during the album's master sessions, the tracks at hand are - at times - as untraceable to their original as they are difficult to genrefy, playing out as true reflections of each individual artist's creative process. Ready for some crooked wisdom? Here's the rundown...
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Side 1 - Yoshimio's (00I00/Saicobab/Boredoms) rendering of "The Guild Of Cowards" is a monumental and hypnotizing mission to an unknown summit. Her masterful drumming and distinctive vocal stabs provide a suspenseful tension and release. Ian Williams/Battles' bewildering take on "Laughing" is an interpretation that leaves the listener off-balance, as though they themselves have been compacted into a cracked, malfunctioning disc drive. Ed Sunspot (alias of visual mastermind Robert Beatty) charts an audio monograph of "Rusty Lemonade" that sees the original cut's paranoid dub make way for an absurdist, psychotropic sort-of exotica. John Herndon (Tortoise/A Grape Dope) follows with his hazy, late-night rearrangement of "The Big Hunger." What was once a terse synth piece now finds itself cruising the hillsides of Los Angeles to distant, unknowable reaches. Legendary Tokyo mavericks Melt Banana have their own way with "Laughing," throwing it through their unique and unmistakable blender while pushing the BPM to its absolute limit. Never a band known for 'taking it easy,' their version is chaotic, tuneful, and memorable in a way that only they could pull-off. Gel Set concludes side A with a slick, club positive, pitch negative run through the source LP's original opener, "Surfs Up," resulting in the closest piece of music in this collection that one could clearly trace to "Dance Music."
Side 2 - Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc/Kinsella & Pulse, Make Believe, etc.) kicks off side B with a taste of Chicago, plunging "Crooked Wisdom" into an equilibrium testing, industrial-strength bath for your ears. Nipping at Kinsella's heels is a vocoder-heavy "Swimming" from multi-instrumental master Dan Bitney (Tortoise/Mecht Mensch). Once a treatise on a certain fear of dying, the tune now finds itself robotripping in an attempt to laugh off its own warped sense of self. Phew! Shit and Shine's alternately monolithic rendering of "Laughing" features a crushed, oozing tone assault that has the potential to leave even the most hardened drone maniac weeping for blessed forgiveness (where cursed little is to be found!). Dream___Mega throws "The Guild of Cowards" for a mighty tumble, frying the original's groove and crystallizing it deep in the core of the listener's consciousness. It'll take geologists years to excavate. Beau Wanzer's exploration of "Legendary Sweet Tooth" exists in a dark space between modernist horror score and mutated disco. Sure to fulfill any warehouse raver's left-of-left field aesthetic desires. Side B is rounded out by Roadhouse (Ryan Davis), who re-tapes "Smooth Rubber Ailment" with a blast of zonked funk, distilling the track down to a stuttering, peculiar, cut and paste 4-track laugh-off.
Digital bonus cuts: Japan's Phew enters as a late addition take a turn at "Ricochet In Limbo", the LP tune's incessant rhythmic heartbeat surgically squeezed into an asymmetrical stereo collage of surrealistic auditory hallucination. And Pod Blotz (Suzy Poling) brings an analog-surreal process to "Swimming", breaking the wash of the original down to its bones, leaving just words and pulses bare to the eternal night air. (Though these tracks appear on the digital-only version due to the physical LP format's limitations and time received, they are in no way any less essential!)
"I greatly admire all of these artists who rather generously donated their thinking and time to this nearly- ridiculous concept. I wouldn't have believed the whole thing myself if I hadn't laid my own two lil' ears on it. When taken on their own, each of these thirteen mixes are hyper-unique standout trips and dips into the source material. But when paired together, they've created peaks and valleys in sequence that function just as the original LP was intended to in my mind...One extended listening experience". - Coffin Prick, 2024
