It’s Friday, which means that it’s nearly the weekend, and also that it’s time to look back at the best new music we’ve heard over the last few days. This week there’s James Murphy remixing David Bowie, along with similarly excellent remixes of tracks by ARP and The Knife, Snoop Dogg and Dâm-Funk collaborating on a summery funk jam, wonderful new material from Yamantaka//Sonic Titan, Bézier and Sapphire Slows, another Bowie remix, and more. It’s all for freeeeeeeeeeee, so click through and get listening!
David Bowie — “Love Is Lost” (Hello Steve Reich mix)
LCD Soundsystem are a thing of the past, but James Murphy can still unleash the goodness when the urge takes him. Some of his best work in the past has been his remixing, after all — remember the killer reworkings of MIA’s “Paper Planes” and Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” among others? — and he turns Bowie’s “Love Is Lost” into a ten-minute hand-clappy epic. The cover art is pretty awesome, too.
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The Knife — “Raging Lung” (Hannah Holland remix)
While we’re on quality remixes, how’s about this spacey house-influenced reinterprteation of this Shaking the Habitual highlight? We likes. (Especially the bass sound.)
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Seven Days of Funk — “Faden Away”
Snoop Dogg rapping over a suitably awesome Dam-Funk liquid funk joint? Uh, yes please. This makes being stuck behind a desk on a gray fall day in NYC feel like cruising down the freeway in LA in an open-top car with the breeze in your hair. (Also, seriously, Dam-Funk is awesome, and hopefully this collaboration will bring him to a wider audience, because he deserves to be massive.)
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Yamantaka//Sonic Titan — “Windflower”
It seems strange to say that a song with a title as abstract as “Windflower” sounds exactly like its name, but it really does — it’s airy, delicate and beautiful, with its ingenuous vocals set over a backing of abstract synth arpeggios. If a “windflower” sounds like anything, it’s probably this.
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ARP — “Gravity” (Peaking Lights remix)
And one more great remix. This finds the ever-excellent Peaking Lights reinventing ARP’s “Gravity” as a nine-minute rhythmic funk epic. More of this, please.
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Sapphire Slows — “Rules”
In fact, the Peaking Lights remix segues nicely into this new track from Tokyo-based Not Not Fun signee Sapphire Slows, which is a slow-burning and largely instrumental piece of pulsing electronica.
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Evan Ønly — “No Matter What”
New music from Underwater Peoples co-founder and up-and-coming NYC culture maker Evan Brody. Its ’80s-influenced production and slick melodies recall the work of Darren Sylvester, whose new video we premiered earlier this week — which perhaps makes sense given the continuing cross-pollination between Underwater Peoples and Melbourne label Chapter Music, who released Sylvester’s new record.
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Blanche Blanche Blanche — “Fisted”
Fisted, eh? Um…
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Bézier — “Templar”
All-analog space funk that sounds like setting controls for the heart of some distant galaxy. This really should be soundtracking some sort of latter-day sci-fi epic sometime soon.
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David Bowie — “Sound and Vision 2013″
And also on the David Bowie tip, honestly, I’m not sure this Sony-approved deconstruction of “Sound and Vision” works especially well — it’s certainly not as good as the original — but it’s worth a listen just to hear the isolated vocal tracks, which Bowie apparently gave remixer Sonjay Prabhakar from the original tapes.