once again, because i love to enumerate…

i’ve been work­ing on a list of my all-time favourite remixes. pretty sure i’ve got it nailed down solid now. i started from a rough list of 150 (ahem), and i cut it in half and then ranked those. the actual list will floow at a later date — because i’m going to do some­thing cool with it — but here are some comments:

appar­ently, my all-time favourite remixer is the orb. wait, this is not a sur­prise. alex (and his chums) have done hun­dreds of remixes over the past 20 years. no sur­prise that he would lead the pack with 9 remixes. the impres­sive part is 4 in the top 15. the rest of the top remixin’ pack:

• daniel myer, 5 remixes
• autechre, 4 remixes
• under­world, 4 remixes
• jack dan­gers, 3 remixes

myer, also no sur­prise. autechre, some­what of a sur­prise, as they haven’t done nearly as many remixes as myer and the orb. under­world and jack dan­gers, both def­i­nite sur­prises — i guess i’d expect those num­bers to be higher, con­sid­er­ing the amount of remixes each has done and how much i like their stuff. in ret­ro­spect, how­ever, i guess i just don’t like their remixes as much. espe­cially jack dan­gers — some of his remixes are amaz­ing, but by and large they’re only ok. he does his best with the source mate­r­ial, no doubt, but only a few times has he reached a level of tran­scen­dence, so to speak. [edit: i just went back and lis­tened to jack’s remixes of a bunch of bands. updat­ing my list is necessary.]

other names i was sur­prised to see with just one are:

• andrew weather­all: he can be kind of samey, it seems.
• coil: though i sup­pose they haven’t done many remixes for other bands at all…
• daniel miller, flood, and fran­cois kevorkian: these guys owned remix­ing mute records acts for eight years, and each ended up with one.
• future sound of lon­don: in the final analy­sis, too sloppy and unfo­cused. burn­ing very bril­liantly when they were on, though. (a lot like their actual career — no way drugs were not a part of this band’s rise and fall.)
• her­bert: well, he has a schtick, like weatherall.
• plaid: don’t like their music much, love their remixes. they have a few oth­ers just out­side of the top 75.
• tom mid­dle­ton & mark pritchard: ok, now i can explain the tech­ni­cal­i­ties. these guys DO amaz­ing remixes, but my cri­te­ria for this list is that a remix improves on an orig­i­nal or takes it in a new direc­tion while retain­ing an obvi­ous link to the orig­i­nal. and that’s why these guys lost: when they do a remix, they write a new song based around a sam­ple or two of the orig­i­nal. ok, it’s amaz­ing, and i love it, but that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it’s a “remix”. i think this is also why under­world lost some as well, because oth­er­wise i would include their “remixes” of their own stuff.
• william orbit: like plaid, he’s got a hand­ful lin­ger­ing just out­side of my top 75.

once again, i’ll be post­ing my full lists soon, in con­junc­tion with turn­ing them into a neat lit­tle project (no, i didn’t do a dj mix of them — it’s actu­ally collaborative!).

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