A spark, maybe?

I'm feeling myself drift more and more into listening to music which, I guess, can be classified as electronica (though as an aside, I must say, that mostly I view genre-classifications of art with disdain). Maybe it's simply that most musicians nowadays simply grew up with computers with decent audio-recording hardware, and started their careers on 'borrowed' audio-editing software rather than on a beat-up acoustic guitar.

As I've hinted in the last blogentry, I have a special interest in collaborations among artists - intended or not. I tend to go hunting for mashups, remixes, covers, duets, etc. In those clashes something new and unexpected sometimes emerges. In trying to bridge the gap between two or more artistic styles, a tension is built - at the most basic level just from not knowing whether the experiment is going to collapse in a puddle, or is going to hold together.

As (another) aside, I think it's the same kind of energy that I seek in live-performances. That spark of energy that emerges from artists that dare to interpret their own (or even better, others) creations live, rather than just reenacting the recordings line by line.

Returning to electronica and the previous paragraph, today I tripped over a fresh remix of Turboweekend's "Trouble Is". Turboweekend is a Danish band typically classified as synth-rock (... well ok, genres are nice for brief introductions - but really - just go listen to them for yourself, rather than believing a two-word-classification). Frankly, I've found their music a bit less than I hoped for. Being a great fan of fellow synth-rockers (pfhhht...) Veto, I simply think, that - apart from great vocals - the singles, I've heard from Turboweekend have lacked ... well, something to surprise me.

That said, right now, I'm trying to decide whether the following remix adds a spark of rawness to "Trouble Is". The remix is by a bloke called Joker (he is a bloke - he is very much from the Bristol scene - and he seems to take his name seriously (quote from The Guardian: "[...] and a third man, 20 years old, who leans in and gives his full name slowly and carefully to the dictaphone as 'Joker ... Joker' [...]".)).

Listen for yourself below:



Oh. And, I should also advertise, that you can listen to the original version of "Trouble Is" on Turboweekend's Myspace-page.