Given that I reckon I can count on one hand the number of remixes that have improved an original song, the thought of approaching a much-loved album that's been entirely remixed by others fills me with dread.
Jo Mango's Murmuration is one of the most exquisitely balanced records I have ever heard, every stripped-back element in its precise compositions included for a specific musical and emotional purpose. To hear some of her songs now broken up and remade by intruding instruments, production-desk distractions and electronic beats that unsettle the originals' smooth surfaces like a rain of stones is, surprisingly, not quite as painful as I'd imagined. Machines In Heaven fashion The Black Sun into a hybrid that is comfortably theirs and hers simultaneously; Ben TD locks on to the essentially melancholy of Blue Dawn Light; Fraction Man's remix of Cross Ties becomes the soundtrack to isolation in a future world. If there's an overall complaint, it's that the remixes reverse what I cherished about the originals, whose delicate humanity is now overwhelmed by a cold mechanical technology.
Alan Morrison
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