Stylusboy – Whole Picture EP (REMIXED)

Stylusboy is a Coventry-based acoustic folk artist who’s Whole Picture EP has got the remix treatment. It’s available from Bandcamp on a name-your-price basis. He will also have a track on Let’s Go Somewhere Quiet – look out for an interview with him next week.

Remixes of whole EPs are a curious thing. Sometimes they can be an opportunity for the remixer to take the original apart, in order to create something new and separate. This can go a bit far, as some of Aphex Twin’s do – like the Curve one which only retained Toni’s intake of breath from the original. But sometimes the remixers are a bit too respectful of the original tunes to really do anything really new and different from the original tracks. Only occasionally does something as good as Fat Boy Slim’s remix of Cornershop come from tinkering very little with the original. It’s more often an improvement to be less in awe of the material, like the Perfecto remix of U2’s Even Better Than The Real Thing.

And so to this EP. The seven tracks are remixed by four indie remixers – Ebenezer, Buchanan, Tom Sanderson and QtheSuit. Ebenezer (Chris Donald) is first up, with Whole Picture, in which he keeps the overall slow pace and the vocal but underpinned by clicky sounds and background bass. Nice. QtheSuit is next with Beyond The Flag. Perhaps I’m simply too conditioned to what I expect to be his cinematic thrill ride. But the low key remix wrong-footed me. Yes, there’s some scuzzing, buzzing guitar in the background and the handclaps but this isn’t the dance frenzy I expected. Buchanan (Duncan Buchanan) remixes Left To Hide and Dave’s Song as big festival anthems a bit like Arcade Fire.

The pick of the remixes is Gunfight At The OK Corral by Tom Sanderson. This uses the vocal as a base for a house anthem. The “You and me, we’re on each other’s side” sample is used to give one of those dancefloor positivity anthems, leading to a thrilling peak half way through. He also remixes Whole Picture as a leftfield electronica track. Perhaps it’s simply what style of stuff I like but these moved me in way that the others didn’t quite.

Stylusboy – Gunfight At The OK Corral (Sanderson Remix)