Watching Battles play on a stage over a lake in France at two in the morning last summer, you could see that they had transformed into a full-blown party band. You could see it in the way Ian Williams was moving in between two keyboards, his porn star moustache twitching, in how Dave Konopka playing with hunched intensity. And then there was John Stanier, destroying the drums in a way that said, "I could definitely kill a man with these hands."
Everyone knows by now that Tyondai Braxton left on bad terms in the middle of making what became Battles' second album, Gloss Drop, and that the remaining members were forced to redefine what the group meant for themselves and for their audience. They managed it admirably, with the shaky live shows at the start of the cycle morphing into unequivocally brilliant outings such as the above-- all of which makes it interesting to wonder why a remix album distorting the band's identity 12 different ways seemed the logical next step.
Each member of Battles has said in interviews that there's a version of Gloss Drop that will never see the light of day. It's an album built on possibilities, one that had a number of distinct incarnations prior to the one we know, which in itself possesses at least three outward personalities. In his review of Gloss Drop, Jess Harvell commented on the album's propensity for pitching virtuosity against silliness, and blurring the lines between human and machine sounds, which are relationships explored-- and sometimes to really great effect—on Dross Glop, this intriguing, rewarding remix collection.
It's an obvious point than when stood against a number of minimal techno rejigs of the source material, it's the playful, borderline daft moments that stand out the most, riding the gamut from fun to flipping nuts. At the milder end of the scale, there's Hudson Mohawke's take on "Rolls Bayce", an unexpectedly soft and emotive take from the Glasgow producer. He plays on the prettier, chiming parts of the original, buffering the steel drum warmth with pillows of sustained, complementing pastel synths. Hyperdub's Kode9 turns "Africastle" into a seven-minute, house-focused mini set of sorts, fizzing and grinding ominously before slamming into a kind of chiptune dancehall dance party. Most strikingly fun of all is Gang Gang Dance's Brian Degraw's reworking of "Ice Cream". In one interview, Ian Williams said that the original reminded him of a Bollywood song before Matias Aguayo's vocals were involved, and here, it's a strutting global magpie, stuttering with rudimentary synths that you might hear at an Omar Souleyman show, dallying with a little dancehall, and ending with Aguayo's sexy grunts looped to lunacy.
While Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundystem) and Dennis McNany's version of the Gary Numan-featuring "My Machines" isn't as nakedly playful as the aforementioned, it's one of a handful of tracks here that amplifies Battles' renowned humorous streak. An itchy stomp at the beginning, by the end it's a distant cousin of Moroder's disco work, where it's not hard to imagine Numan busting out the chorus of "I feeeeeel looooove." Shabazz Palaces turn "White Electric" into a coolly loping presence, repurposing the song's bass into what sounds like a horn section, again blurring that line between organic and synthesized sounds. Even though The Alchemist's interpretation of "Futura" is ominous, hanging heavily around a Dilla-style beat, his inclusion of one of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotations feels knowing and delivered with a raised eyebrow, all things considered: "If a futurist could, by some miracle, predict the future, his prediction would sound so absurd and so far fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn."
In contrast to this collection's more boisterous efforts, it would be easy to overlook some of the subtler, more cerebral moments here, one of the finest examples of which comes with the Field's remix of "Sweetie and Shag". Axel Willner's last album, Looping State Of Mind, was his most varied collection yet, but this redux is disarmingly simple, paring the chiming, furious clank of the original down to something many half-lives removed, recalling the sense of decay that Willner demonstrated on "Then It's White"; Kazu Makino's vocal turn is reduced to a series of gasps in among tight snares. At their finest, these quieter moments touch on the emotive slant of Hudson Mohawke's remix: Qluster's "Dominican Fade" pairs prim horns with beautiful organ glimmers, sounding nothing like the source material but no worse for it. The same can't be said for Kangding Ray's "Toddler", which is four minutes longer than the original, sounds nothing like it, and resembles a steady, dull rave on an active helipad at its most exciting; elsewhere, Gui Boratto's "Wall Street" feels blocky in comparison to the way some of these remixes play with differing tempos, like the anxiously palpitating grind of Silent Servant's "Inchworm".
While a few songs here feel like very distant relations of the originals that inspired them, there's only one remix present that lives up to the full inversion promised by the album's title: unsurprisingly, that comes from Boredoms' Eye, enlisted to remix his own Gloss Drop appearance, "Sundome". Where the original was neatly sparkling and contained in its final bout of explosiveness, Eye's own version is elephantine, blown out, and cacophonous, with his tentacular mind throwing all sense of structure against the wall. It's a thrilling look inside his brain, a microcosmic version of this peep under the hood that Battles have allowed with Dross Glop, showing off the constituent parts that now make their machine a smooth, assured, and always giddily exciting ride.
