DJ Red - Raw Cacao

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  • Simona Calvani doesn't release music all that often—she's better known for her residency at Rome's Goa Club than for her smattering of productions for Electric Deluxe, BPitch Control and others. But it's just as well she decided to go to the studio for the session that produced "Raw Cacao." The track is one of her strangest and best, swaggering along in the low 120-BPM range under a discoloured cloud of bell tones and warped voices. The low-end throb is at odds with the beat, adding to the sense of drunkenness, before ducking out for a swirling, disorientating breakdown. The track's textural richness and after-hours quirk—not to mention the weird voices—make it perfect Villalobos fodder, and his remix does pretty much exactly what you'd expect. The technoid thud is swapped for trickier house drums that uncoil fitfully over 11 minutes. Otherwise, the material is preserved but somehow made even stranger. Synth tones curdle in the upper register, and uneven scraps of sound—processed bits of voice, or synth, or both?—flutter below. It's as if Villalobos hasn't reconstructed Calvani's world so much as delved deeper into it. Time and space are yet more distorted, and the exit signs are lost in the clouds of noxious dry ice.
  • Tracklist
      A Raw Cacao B Raw Cacao (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)
RA