- Two Warp artists, plus Equiknoxx, remix the Radiohead frontman.
- Back in 2006, just before releasing his first solo record, Thom Yorke sat down with Fresh Air's Terry Gross and revealed the underpinnings of his dance floor-related music. "The things that I was really, really into at college was electronic music," he said. "All the Detroit techno stuff... There's the Warp label in Sheffield... I was DJing every Friday at college. It just sounded fantastic coming out of your Technics 1200s, the needle's a bit damaged and the speakers are kind of blowing up and you've had a little bit too much to drink and some twit is asking for The Pogues again, so you just whack on, like, some Warp record really loud and clear the dance floor."
Yorke's dance music has always been about the juxtaposition of his intricate pop songwriting, his seeming alienation and the aforementioned '90s acid, techno and IDM influences. The sparkly, arpeggiated centerpiece off his recent ANIMA album, "Not The News," felt like a triumph on all those counts, so it feels natural he'd ring up a couple of Warp mainstays—Mark Pritchard and Clark—for a remix.
Successfully remixing Yorke seems to hinge on retaining the elements that make him one of the most distinctive artists of all time—that icy caterwaul, the sweeping pop hooks, the claustrophobic feeling. Pritchard has already staged a successful collaboration with him, and its safe to say records like his Link & E621 collaboration (released by Warp in 1995) were exactly what the Radiohead frontman was caning in student discos. For his "Not The News" mix, Pritchard looks back to the sumptuous broken beat of his Troubleman project, upping the DJ potential of the original with a relentless hand drum loop and looming strings and subs.
Equiknoxx's Time Cow and Gavsborg concoct an alien, dancehall-rooted rhythm with a dolorous, pitch-bent synth breakdown befitting the source material. Chris Clark strays furthest for his bizarre take, channeling the orchestral impulse of his recent Kiri Variations album into a novel, if somewhat off-putting mix of dubstep, post-punk and musique concrète.
Each remix prominently features the opening line of Yorke's original, which appears here as an "Extendo Mix" nearly double the length of the album version. The lyrics, naturally, have Yorke dancing while some ill-defined, foreboding force threatens to suck him in. "Who are these people? / I'm in black treacle… Enough of broken glass / Enough so I can eat / My dancing feet."
TracklistA1 Not The News (Extendo Mix)
A2 Not The News (Mark Pritchard Remix)
B1 Not The News (Equiknoxx Remix)
B2 Not The News (Clark Remix)