In dance music, ideas become cornerstones, cornerstones become rules, rules become clichés, clichés become memes-- and memes are made to be subverted. AraabMuzik is one of the unlikeliest crossover stars to jump from hip-hop production to festival-scale electronic bass music, and it's largely because he treats that latter genre in the context of the former. Albums like Electronic Dream and For Professional Use Only took an approach to beat-extending, break-isolating mixing that goes back four decades, and drew out some of the moodier, wilder elements of his source material using the oldest trick in the hip-hop book: repossessing the entire intent of a song by isolating one specific stretch of it.
So much of the material that AraabMuzik's been dealing with over the past few years, from arena dubstep to pop-chart trance, rides on peaks-and-valleys successions of build-ups to bombastic peaks. AraabMuzik's mutation of that dynamic into a steady, prolonged all-peaks churn is the key: who says you have to wait for the drop? In that sense, The Remixes Vol. 1 isn't significantly different than his previous records' approaches. There's more of a feel of “official” business to it; much of the source material comes from the Ultra Music label and skews closer to the Electric Daisy Carnival aesthetic than anything AraabMuzik's worked with to date. But that's the closest there is to a unifying background to The Remixes, which really does make his own choppily momentous, joyously abrasive, and widely sourced sense of rhythm the biggest common denominator.
Mt. Eden's “Sierra Leone” is a sort of mission statement. In its original form, it's as steadily composed and fluid as wobbly bass anthems get, a balanced split between hard bombast and billowy emotion that might sound like a maximalist Clams Casino if you stripped out all the wubs. Which is just what AraabMuzik does at the outset, juicing it up with orchestra hits and rearranging the beat so it's more distinctly hip-hop-friendly. And once the wobble-bass does get dropped in, it's more of a rumbling shudder than the hyperactive hiccups in the original. Further elements of AraabMuzik's style show up in more transformative moments, like the nearly from-scratch rebuild of Wolfgang Gartner's Omarion-featuring “Still My Baby”. That cut revamps its tweaky electro house chords into a more spread-out melody that stalks like a 1980s slasher-flick villain over a more traditional house 4/4, then unexpectedly disintegrates into a puddle of rattling snares that make a point of proving why the best trap comes from a miles-deep hip-hop grounding.
Not that The Remixes Vol. 1 pins him to any genre constraints. Style trumps niche every time here, and in its efficiently compact sub-hour runtime there's plenty of opportunity to let that style run through all kind of territory. His take on Skrillex's omnipresent remix of Benny Benassi's “Cinema” cuts to the chase, as AraabMuzik lets that hyperventilating gatling-laser drop loop for long enough to make its overamped malfunctioning slot-machine spasm feel as simple and immediate as the “Ante Up” horns. Steve Aoki's Kid Cudi/Travis Barker collab “Cudi the Kid” is saved from its flabby trance-n-bass excess with a slick minor-key pitch shift and a regrouping around a martial, mid-tempo slice of breakbeat. It's ambitious recontextualization, even if it gets away from him a little: another Gartner cut, “Cognitive Dissonance”, lives up to the title with some abrupt borderline-trainwreck swings from electro to boom-bap that would work together as individual pieces. And his soulful remix of Taana Gardner's 81 b-boy disco staple “Heartbeat” sticks out amidst all this top-dollar superclub material like a banana-seat Schwinn Sting-Ray at the Tour de France, though it's no big dealbreaker when the worst thing you can say about a mix selection is that it makes you wish he'd do an old-school all-West End Records set.
But the real thread here, characteristically enough, is mood. AraabMuzik's always had a tendency to twist even the most euphoric hands-up moments of EDM crowdpleasers into something more overcast and ambivalent, and that's what continues to keep his material compelling. It's easy to hear the excitement and flashiness in his beats, but there's just enough restraint and lingering darkness that it's like siphoning all the gloss off candy paint or replacing neon with flourescent lights. Turning big drops into hypnotic loops, ditching crescendos for churn, programming and manipulating beats that shudder restlessly in otherwise Swiss-timing rhythmic constraints-- this isn't simple edit work, it's an entire tonal shift. That said, there are two original cuts here. One is closer “Keep it in Motion”, a showcase for NoLa rapper Chase N. Cashe that, while a pretty straightforward money-flinging door-kicker with the MC on it, shows up earlier as an instrumental that reveals some tense, icy arpeggios driving those chattering snares. The other one's a sparse number featuring bleary, slowly floating chords and near-subliminal mournful choir vocals. The title? “Darkside”. Just so you know where he's coming from.
