- 'Man In A Box' is a release from last year by Englishman Steve Barnes, who previously scored a hit with a track actually titled 'Cosmic Sandwich'. Since then Barnes has also released 'Zig-Zag Feeling' on My Best Friend and worked with Traum's Dominik Eulberg amongst others. This time around he adopts Cosmic Sandwich as his moniker and calls on Andre Kraml and Daso for remix duties.
Andre Kraml, who is best known for his Crosstown Rebels track 'Safari' (remixed by James Holden), gets a call to remix the A-side. Cast your mind back to Orange Lemon's 'Dreams of Santa Anna' and its warped-pitch on the vocal and you'll feel the connection. Featuring a low slung bassline, down and dirty, there are lots of elements bubbling away in this piece, almost fighting to make an appearance under loads of compression. Kraml's remix of 'Man In A Box' is without a doubt, a sandwich of cosmic proportions with weirded out witch cackles, glitchy computer noises, vibrato effects and generally loony vibes that grab you immediately.
The remix from indie house producer Daso opens with a swish of a spacey chord before a clunking beat made up of so much mid-range kicks off sounding like a noise you'd get from banging two metal pipes together underwater. More crunchiness is added with an electronic finger-click and this remix starts to sound like future house from another galaxy. An arpeggiated-synth modulates to give us a revamp on that Moroder-styled bassline but this suddenly evaporates, and after a brief voice snippet we are launched into an incessant, driving piece of electronica. More vocal samples tell us to get "physical" and indeed we should as this track is flowing with energy. This feels like some of those classic, hard-prog tracks from days gone by (circa the Probe releases on the Limbo label), re-rubbed with a techy touch and a breath of fresh air, ensuring this track sounds bang up-to-date.
This remix package of Cosmic Sandwich's 'Man In A Box' is a sparky, uptempo affair but personally speaking, from a DJ's perspective, the Daso mix would be the one I'd be most likely to use.