For all its eerie qualities as a work of music, King Midas Sound's Waiting for You was just as striking in spatial terms-- bass throbs, snare hits, and voices, usually broodingly quiet or tautly fretful, reverberating in sonic dub chambers that practically dwarfed them a thousandfold. With all that room, there's plenty of scope to rebuild things, rearrange the elements, and see how the angles of all those deep echoes change. Dabrye's 2008 chrome-and-neon g-funk remix of "One Ting" was one of the earliest reinterpretations of Kevin Martin and Roger Robinson's collaborative efforts, and possibly the best to date. But it also shared space on the "Cool Out" b-side with Flying Lotus' twitchy, boiling-water mutation of "Lost"-- a remix just as eager to coax out the ghostly elements of Robinson's voice, but approaching it more like a counterpoint than a complement.
Both cuts appear on Without You, a remix album that largely pulls off the rare feat of adding to its source material's mystique without necessarily displacing it. It's not really a track-by-track revisit, and there's a deep focus on some songs in particular-- like the Kiki Hitomi feature "Goodbye Girl", which gets three different reinterpretations from three different remixers. (And that's on the digital/CD version; the 2xLP has five.) But while the versions spring from the same source material, and they all preserve the source track's heartbroken bitterness, it's all to different ends. Take note of Jamie Vex'd's rework under his Kuedo alias, which pares back and pitches up Robinson's voice to put more attention on Hitomi's sharp-edged purr, and ramps up the drums while turning the backing track into a borderline-gothic drone. Put it next to the Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe rework, and that only makes the latter track's ambient bent sound that much more austere and suspenseful, like the noise of an abandoned space station. And there's still room for Echospace's all-analog reassemblage, which streamlines near-subliminal rumbles of the vocal track into an ultra-dense, bass-heavy yet still billowy minimal house groove.
It's easy to lose track of things with this multiple-version lineup. Gang Gang Dance and Mala take turns shifting the foreboding environmental-crisis warnings of "Earth a Kill Ya" into opposite avenues, the former constructing a hiccupy bionic junkshop skank rhythm around it while the latter drops propulsive, bongo-driven vintage dubstep breaks into the original track's once-austere surroundings. And the other take on "Lost" besides FlyLo's belongs to Nite Jewel, and her sun-bleached electro-pop is enriched enough by Robinson's voice to defy any chillwitch dreamhouse associations you could throw at it. And yet all these reworks and revisions stay in the general vicinity of the original album's tone of massive yet starkly open spaces, adding a few new facets but always staying close to the fine line Waiting for You treaded between bleak and euphoric.
The other trick is to scatter in some revoices along with the remixes, with different singers and vocal tracks versioning dubs of the original Martin productions. "Spin Me Around" is the most revelatory, as Cooly G uses the 100-story-high swoon of "Meltdown" to lay down what is more or less a straight-up R&B vocal-- and a knockout at that, love-stoned and out of her own mind with ecstasy. And D-bridge's title-track revoice of "Without You" matches Robinson's rich yet vulnerable precedent with a resonantly fragile deep house-indebted vocal lead of his own. Others feel a bit more dispensable: there's some attention-getting restrained intensity in Hitomi's voice in her takeover of "Cool Out" on "Tears", but it's more of a pleasant variation on the original's lover's-rock bliss than a bonafide transformation. And revoices featuring Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford ("Say Something") and Scritti Politti's Green Gartside ("Come and Behold") sound a bit too bright and upbeat, getting a bit at-odds with the original deep-dub atmosphere to click as strongly as the others. No matter-- there's still plenty of room for them.
