From time to time, I pick up a cheap sampler or compilation CD on which I recognise one or two artists in the interests of exposing myself to new music. Obviously, this is a bit hit-and-miss, but I see it as an investment akin to occasionally buying handfuls of cheap vinyl on spec and regard wading through a fair amount of banal/unlistenable stuff as the price to be paid for the occasional worthwhile discovery - and, after all, being able to listen to entirely new music is intrinsically rewarding, even if the music itself isn't always any good, or apt to my tastes.
The latest of these was put together by Skyscraper Magazine, the which I'd never heard of, and took the form of a collection of remixes of songs by independent artists - some of the remixes were done by the original artists, and others by entirely new interpreters. I picked it up because it included tracks by Les Savy Fav and the Murder City Devils (two artists which I know more by reputation than in fact, despite having seen about half of an LSV gig in the course of checking out Pretty Girls Make Graves late last year); as it turned out, those two were the only two original artists/remixers on the whole CD that I'd even heard of (bar Jimmy Tamborello aka Dntel).
Due to this near-complete unfamiliarity, I was initially responding to each of the cuts as a piece of music in its own right, rather than by reference to my knowledge of the original, or either of the artists concerned, and this has made for interesting listening.
The first two tracks - Sean Richey remixing Bent Leg Fatima's "Cup and Saucer" (obscurely, Richey's liner notes reference Foucault) and Jon Finley and Joe Dennis' take on The Party of Helicopters' "Circling the Drain/Lost in the Desert" - are highlights for me at this point; the former is built on a propulsive hip-hop beat, underlaid by drifting, almost ethereal vocal samples; the latter is a My Bloody Valentine-esque 'swathes of guitar' style number. Also tops is the raucous, energetic remix of Your Adversary's "AeroBending" done by Sultan Subraman, which I don't really have the electronic music vocabulary to describe (though the grrl punk-rock vocals which cut in at the end as a kind of vocal bridge are a nice touch).
Elsewhere, there's some nice lap-pop (somewhat a la Postal Service), a bit of more ordinary-sounding dj mixing, and, as is de rigeur for CDs given over to experimental music, some outright craziness (though relatively little of that last). Overall, despite the presence of a small handful of uninteresting/downright tedious cuts, definitely a good pick-up.
