- ‘Mismoplastico’ belongs to Renaissance. They featured it on god knows how many CDs and its progressive throb plus spooky chants formula is indelibly associated with that label and that time.
And let’s be clear, that’s not good news for remixers. To take something that’s frankly very dated, and not particularly in tune with current tastes, but make it sound fresh is a bit of a challenge. Michael Ho and Serge Santiago take on the task in very different ways.
Ho’s approach is to deconstruct the track and use half of the riff plus the “Virtual mismo, mismo plastico’ chants, but graft them onto a more current rhythm track which pops and jiggles in an attempt to make the source material a little more funky. He succeeds in making the tune sound more modern, but not in making it sound particularly good—there is tension but no release.
Santiago on the other hand starts with the nature of the track—anthemic, dramatic and welded to a somewhat plodding 4/4, and works from there. It’s a little as if he boiled ‘Mismoplastico’ down to its essence—it’s the same tune, just stronger. It has an almost hardstyle feel to it with the weight of the beats and the way the ‘answer’ part of the riff chimes in like the world ending. Real shiver-down-the-spine stuff, this, made to be heard in large rooms somewhere in the lost zones. ‘Music for huge space arenas’ as the Cold Rush people would say.
There’s something very satisfying about what Serge Santiago has done here, as if it’s a lesson to always respect the original vision of a track before you remix it. After all nothing’s easier than to destroy than a good idea.
Tracklist1. Mismoplastico (Serge Santiago Maxi Edit)
2. Mismoplastico (Michael Ho's Plastic Planet Mix)
3. Mismoplastico (Shakedown Mix)