Now here’s a toughie. How does one fairly review the remixes without having heard the originals? And how does one grapple with remixes of avant-garde / experimental electronica that incorporates elements of drum ‘n’ bass, no-wave, free jazz, psychedelic rock, minimal techno and avant-garde classical music? One takes it for what it is, I suppose. The tracks on ‘Sylt Remixes’ are out there, curious hybrids of anything and everything including the kitchen sink. John Cage, Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept are probably fair reference points for starters.
Of the 14 tracks on ‘Sylt Remixes,’ 6 are versions of ‘Keet.’ Generally, I find endless remixes of the same track insufferably tedious, so much credit is due to both Icarus for not only writing a piece that takes well to reinterpretation, but also for placing the track in the hands of a range of artists who have such widely varied musical visions. The result is not so much six different mixes, but six entirely different tunes.
The ISAN remix of ‘Keet’ is a gently rhythmic chillout movement that stands in contrast to the Ital Tek Remix of Selfautoparent, which is jarring, pops, crackles and glitches places arhythmically over a yawning bassline.
The Svartbag remix of Jyske Is appropriately positioned right in the middle of the album, and it’s a towering, lumbering monolith of a track. It’s slow – very slow, how Earth might have sounded had they been electro – and majestic, and sprawls to a truly monumental eleven and a half minutes. The percussion is weighty and deliberate and there’s actually something recognisable as riff that repeats endlessly beneath shifting incidental scrapes and scratches.
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The Oxy mix of Keet by Ivan Pavlov is delicate and evokes an oriental scene over which percussive rattlings and scrapes clatter in and out in extreme stereo, lending a rather disorientating feel to what might otherwise be a most tranquil sliver of sound.
Jyske Rugkiks sees avant-jazz stylings predominate for the first half, before giving way to smoother brass and synthscape with fluttering percussion flitting across the air.
After a while the tracks do merge together somewhat, and taken as a whole, ‘Sylt Remixes’ is more a background album than one to really listen to. That said, it’s rather disjointed and there are too many jarring and dissonant passages for it to be a truly ambient album. All of this means that it’s almost impossible to place this album anywhere other than in the ‘slightly uneasy listening’ bracket. In an age of mass-conformity and mainstream music-by-numbers, such non-conformity can only be a good thing.
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