by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Back in September the world was graced with Operator Music Band’s full length debut album, Duo Duo. The record was a culmination of everything they had been building toward with their captivating EPs and singles, turning toward a funkier and more electronic sound, but keeping their futuristic art-pop at the core of it all. The liquid grooves and motorik rhythms wriggled and snapped the songs into place, the exuberance of it all adding to its appeal. Now the band have reinvented the album on Duo Duo: The Remixes, brought to life by peers such as Guerilla Toss, TMBOY, Zenizen, Smhoak Mosheein, and more. The record is left in-tact with the same songs in the same order, but everything else has been reimagined.
Between the wide breath of artists remolding Operator Music Band’s frameworks, the album still maintains a cohesive nature, though their structures have been loosened, flipped, and reorganized in multitude of ways, both familiar and alien. TMBOY’s take on album opener “Slim Spin” is gorgeous and ambient, a warm and spacious sprawl that takes the original and scatters into millions of floating pieces, set adrift in a gravity-less atmosphere. Pollens’ Jeff Aaron Bryant remixes “Income/Outcome” toward new territory altogether, removing the fuzzy synths for a polyrhythmic flurry of percussion that feels primal, veering closer to house and world music than anything art-pop. “Fiji” becomes a soulful club banger in the vein of The Stone Roses meets Neu in the hands of Chifon, working a dub beat into something writhing with cosmic energy. Smhoak Mosheein’s take on “Trippple” takes on nearly three times the length of the original, sound chopped and screwed to a doom-like dirge that crackles underneath the pressure of the monolithic pacing. It’s a great collection of interpretations on Operator Music Band’s music, remixed beyond limitations, and showing anything remains possible.