- I have a confession to make - I never quite understood minimal. I'd like to blame it on the fact that I'm rather club-deficient (location, location, location), so I didn't like (kill me now) Audion's 'Mouth to Mouth', that is until I heard it in a club, completely understood it and promptly fell for it. By 'understood', I'm not referring to the cerebral level only, but to the heart-exploding qualities of it. I wasn't behind anymore.
I guess listening to music through headphones made me forget about a crucial element of sound - the bass. Also, by listening the only dancing part of my body was the brain; when I really danced, I could understand the music through my body. I could see that minimal is not the intellectual beast some snotty Germans wanted to make of it - it's an especially great form of dance music. It's so clear to me that it feels like pop sometimes.
Why is this introduction important? I'm really not one of those me-journalists, but this is by way of explaining my background is not with the colder techno side of things, but with the warmer, emotive side. I'd like to use this little story to exemplify the crossover appeal of Audion's 'No Fit State' remix, the latest installment in Hot Chip's 'Our idols remix us’ series. The previous volume was an outstanding collaboration with Booka Shade, and this time Mathew Dear gets a chance to take a minimalistic shot.
For the Web 2.0 generation, Hot Chip and Audion working together makes perfect sense: it encourages the MySpace kids to go and explore this whole minimal-schminimal (as Alex Smoke would say) thing. And yes, crossover means it works the other way around: Cold hearted Europeans can learn to enjoy the occasional pop song as well.
Moving on from the sociological mumbo-jumbo, the music is excellent. It serves the crossover notion very well: The vocals of Hot Chip singer Alexis Taylor are given a shade of melancholic warmth, and Audion busts out his skillful loop reconstruction techniques to create a slow-mo rearranged monster. Forget 'No Fit State' and welcome 'No Fit State 2.0' - Audion's interpretation of how Hot Chip would sound if they all lived in a loft in Berlin with Ricardo, Richie, Troy and the rest of the gang - this remix works great for everyone.
TracklistA Hot Chip - No Fit State (Audion Remix)