Vote Aaron Frank for Secretary of Agriculture.
Around my fifth listen of Jamie xx’s new Four Tet remix, I noticed a Soundcloud comment that almost exactly mirrored my feelings on the track. “Totally incredible. It’s the future,” the comment read. And while the first part might have been bombastic praise, the second part about it being “the future” made me consider how Jamie xx and the new generation of producers seem well prepared to take the reigns from the veterans in years to come.
Released back in August, Four Tet’s Pink is a candidate for best electronic album of the year. Combining several of his recent club-oriented singles with even more unreleased tracks, it’s one of the rare compilation-style albums that actually contains a thru-line and a distinctly original feel. Over the past couple years, artists like Four Tet and Daphni (Dan Snaith) have begun to favor single releases over typical albums, specifically because of the changing tone of their music, which is unmistakably more hard-hitting than their often ambient and Balearic-inspired material.
On Jamie xx’s remix of “Lion”, one of the stand-outs from Pink, the young producer with only a Gil Scott-Heron remix album and one single to his name somehow manages to take the song to new heights. Almost completely incomparable to the original, Jamie xx takes the pristine, fairly straightforward track and trashes it in a mud puddle, before leaving it to dry out in a dank London subway tunnel. The distortions and echoes are downright haunting, and though it’s two minutes shorter than the original, it might leave an even more indelible impression.
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