The night before Thanksgiving 1997, Madonna was partying with drag queens, circus performers, and fire-eaters. It was the second anniversary celebration for Liquid, the ultra-glamorous Miami party spot co-owned by the singer’s close friend and rumored lover, Ingrid Casares. In Madonna’s book Sex, Casares is the one who straddled railings and demanded to be finger-fucked; at Liquid, she was the vibe curator-in-chief who conjured its atmosphere of haute-bohemian pansexual debauchery—the kind Madonna had depicted in her “Deeper and Deeper” video a few years before. Casares’ club was a magnet for models, moguls, and pop stars, who would shimmy to resident DJs like Junior Vasquez, Victor Calderone, and Danny Tenaglia on velvet banquettes, raise glasses to their beautiful lives, and enjoy the excellent local cocaine.
Just after midnight on November 26, Madonna and her entourage arrived and slipped the DJ a CD-R containing remixes of unreleased tracks. Everyone lost it. “All of a sudden, you heard the very beginning of Ray of Light,” said Casares, likely referring to William Orbit’s Liquid Mix of the title track. “Once people realized that it was her, they went really crazy. Even the mayor of Miami started dancing. At six o’clock in the morning, I was still pushing people out.” Veronica Electronica had arrived.
In multiple interviews promoting Ray of Light in early 1998, Madonna described Veronica Electronica as a club-music obsessed “alter ego” who represented the flipside to the Kabbalah-wise spiritualist of her seventh studio album. She planned to release a collection of remixes and outtakes under the name that fall that included the “totally out of control” 10-minute original version of “Ray of Light” and unreleased “tripped-out, ambient shit” she had worked on with Orbit, the co-producer of all but one of the album’s songs. The idea of Veronica Electronica still feels like a thrilling prospect. Its parent album is near-mythic at this point for its, well, liquid fusion of Bristol dub, stormy breakbeat, metal riffs, and posh orchestration, and a reappraisal could have created a musical dialogue with Ray of Light’s contemporary acolytes, pop singers who slip into moonbathing reveries at the rave.
That isn’t the version of Veronica Electronica we got 27 years later. Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album. There’s precious little trace of Orbit, and judging by a pointed recent statement calling it “a knockoff,” he wasn’t involved. Instead, the album pristinely remasters the big-tent donks of mixes by the Liquid lot—and some of them still hit. BT and Sasha’s Bucklodge Ashram New Edit of “Drowned World / Substitute for Love” turns the existential original into a Euro banger, whipping its desolate bridge into a frenzy like fiendish jockeys forcing a thoroughbred faster, faster, before a pyrotechnic drop. New York DJ Victor Calderone’s New Edit of “Sky Fits Heaven” buffs its percussion and turbo-charges the zaps that halo Madonna’s voice with a euphoric final chorus which, like the classic Above & Beyond Club Mix of “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” makes you want to cry and scream and dance all at once.
Ray of Light found the symmetry between such extremes. “Skin” sought sex as an escape from psychic torture—or maybe from horniness—over an assaultive beat that, brilliantly, made you want to throw up. By comparison, the synth stabs of Peter Rauhofer and Calderone’s “Collaboration Remix Edit” are disappointingly literal, foregrounding X-static ad-libs and sealed with a kiss. As if sex were ever that simple. Other tracklist choices are simply strange. It’s hard to imagine why Fabien’s mildly frightening Good God Mix Edit of “The Power of Goodbye” was plucked over the other official mixes widely available. (The Dallas Austin mix is right there.)
Veronica Electronica doesn’t know if it wants to dynamically reinvent the remixes of its day or present an authoritative survey of them. It winds up doing neither. Many of Ray of Light’s most popular remixes are absent, including Calderone’s “Frozen” edit—an 11-minute amyl high—as well as the techno spaghetti Western of Sasha’s Ultraviolet “Ray of Light” edit and Club 69’s over-carbonated Radio Mix of “Nothing Really Matters.” That’s presumably due to their (truncated) inclusion on Madonna’s patchy 2022 remix collection Finally Enough Love, but you miss them all the same. A more considered and well-rounded collection might have unearthed treasures of the time like the mythologized Junior Vasquez mix of “The Power of Goodbye,” as well as demos like “Revenge.” Even so, Orbit’s Widescreen Mix of “Frozen” is no slouch, deepening the song’s menace with a scratchy, percussive mezzanine. Less essential are Sasha’s Twilo Mix of “Ray of Light” and Club 69’s Speed Mix dub of “Nothing Really Matters,” both of which would sound great in a ’90s lounge club with blue cocktails and lava lamps but maybe only then.
Veronica Electronica’s sole new track, the Rick Knowles co-production “Gone Gone Gone,” is an all-too-brief glimpse into the scrappy urgency of Ray of Light’s original sessions. It feels like dancing to bobbleheaded techno while oms from your neighbors’ sound bath bleed through the walls. Fresh from Andrew Lloyd Webber boot camp, Madonna’s relatively untreated Evita-strong vocals ride with a bricolage of the UK dance underground that fascinated her, in a peek into Ray of Light before it had quite transcended its references.
A few days after Veronica Electronica’s tracklist was announced this June, William Orbit posted his verdict based on versions of the remixes that were circulating online. “Given how much the Ray of Light album has meant to us, there could be something really wonderful,” he wrote. “A double album, say [...] going into that special place.” As well as divorcing Ray of Light from its co-architect, Veronica Electronica is painfully disconnected from the excitement that Madonna clearly feels about her catalog from the time. Part of what made her 2023-4 Celebration Tour so electrifying was its pointed desire to take her classics into a new dimension. For the opening, tour music director Stuart Price amped up the Club 69 Radio Mix of “Nothing Really Matters”—its definitive rework—into techno-eutopia, with an opening that felt like shards slicing through the arenas. “Ray of Light,” performed in mid-air, became a brilliant noise as big as the sky. Veronica Electronica promised to soar just as high, but it hardly gets off the ground.
