When I heard about Panthalassa, I braced myself for Laswell to ruin Miles’s most exciting work the way he boiled down Marley’s tough, conscious reggae into mystical soup.Īs it turns out though, Panthalassa is a fine record. It’s one thing to collaborate, even indirectly, with a living person it’s another to bask safely in the glory of a legend who can’t comment on your work one way or the other.
Burroughs tribute and last year put out an album of ambient dub remixes of Bob Marley. Apparently he’s going after the dead ones now: in addition to Panthalassa, Laswell has also contributed to a recent William S. Over the last 20 years, the bassist and producer has worked with just about every musician alive, from Whitney Houston to Herbie Hancock to John Lydon to Lemmy Kilmister.
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The effect is staggering, like running full speed around a city block and then suddenly walking: the burn is still there.īill Laswell is well acquainted with electric Miles, and like Miles he has long championed an aesthetic that places more importance on process than on finished product.
Miles and the band might start out pinning you to the wall with sheer volume and rhythm–the drums crashing like a stock car pileup, the wah-wahed guitar screaming like a cat in heat, Miles stabbing the air over and over with a single note on the trumpet–and then slow down, not gradually but abruptly. There may be no modern music more fascinating in its willful malleability. Each was constructed from hours of studio or live jams producer Teo Macero would edit down mountains of tape, adding effects and looping parts or sections, making the tracks cohere whether they lasted 2 or 32 minutes. Miles Davis released 13 albums between 19, 10 of them doubles. Maybe more instructive are two recent remix projects that could have been masterpieces but aren’t: Bill Laswell’s rehashing of most of Miles Davis’s electric period, Panthalassa, and Jason Nevins’s working over of two famous hip-hop tracks, Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two.” Both sources were ripe for remixing, each having pioneered a cut-and-paste aesthetic in some way, but neither producer was able to make a new record that justified its existence next to the original. These two tracks are everything a remix should be: smart, fun to listen to (and dance to, in this case), imaginative, an extension of the original work that isn’t too reverent. For “Professional Widow” Van Helden structured an entirely new rhythm track, with a walloping funk bass line and galloping drums, over which Tori repeats “Gotta be big” like a robot the repetition is hedonistic, ecstatic. The result is better than anything else carrying the group’s name. For “Spin Spin Sugar,” he constructed an epic of tension and release: a swirling, dense fog of sound gives way to a skipping house beat, which breaks down, comes back, and is swamped by an enormous bass line as Kelli Dayton’s vocal, intact from the original and double-tracked to fantastic effect on the chorus, cuts through the wall of sound. A good deal of a remix’s appeal nowadays has to do with how much of the remixer’s own personality is injected, and how it either dovetails or strikes sparks with the original spirit of the work.Īrmand Van Helden, for instance, has a most impressive track record for taking on dubious projects and coming up with gold: his remixes of Tori Amos’s “Professional Widow” and the Sneaker Pimps’ “Spin Spin Sugar” are bold masterpieces that foreshadowed the speed-garage sound that’s held UK club kids in thrall for the past year. Cool J’s “Jingling Baby.” Since good sampling equipment became available at lower prices early this decade, remixes have tended toward elaborate new constructions that retain only faint traces of the original. It became commonplace during the late 80s and early 90s in hip-hop and early rave circles remixes by top producers could often create a club hit for an artist, like Marley Marl’s remix of L.L. Remixing can be traced back to mid-70s Jamaica, where producers would reinvent existing reggae material in “versions” or “dubs,” and late-70s New York, where Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan would extend the most danceable grooves on disco records.
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