- Wicked Witch is the scrappy synth-funk alias of Richard Simms, a Washington, D.C. native whose short run of early '80s records fetch up to three-figure sums on the second-hand market. (The Japanese label EM Records has since compiled most of those tracks on Chaos 1978-86.) It's funny to consider Simms' songs as luxury items—with the exception of the widescreen disco-funk of "Vera's Back," from 1984's Wicked Witch EP, his sound is crunchy, raw and prone to sudden turns. The previously unreleased tracks on Under Your Spell are among Simms' most hallucinatory and uncompromising.
"Under Your Spell" is a chewed-up, synth-scarred funk jam. Its homespun textures include the aggressive splat of Simms' guitar solo, which drowns the groove in crumpled sheets of distortion. But there's also the glassy "Under Your Spell 2016," a more affable version. "Funk By U," a skinny synth piece with gurgling FX and scattered hand drums, stacks its parts in an unsteady column. These ragged imbalances are mostly a virtue.
DJ Slyngshot's remix irons some of those wrinkles. The German producer keeps the drums loose and dusty, arranging the synth lines around a more orderly rhythm. It's more useful for DJs and a great track in its own right, but the dripping and slopping of Simms' original is missed. Koshiro Hino and Yousuke Yukimatsu, collaborating as YYPYY, reconstruct the unknown track "In The Way Of WSB" as an acid-accented strobe of clicks, snares, drones and broken beats. It sounds somewhat out of place in the tracklist, which actually makes a lot of sense on Under Your Spell.
TracklistA1 Under Your Spell
A2 Funky By U
B1 Take A Bite Of Brains
B2 Under Your Spell 2016
C1 Take a Bite of Brains (DJ Slyngshot Re-edit)
D1 In the Way of WSB (YYPYY Reconstruction)