- Dan Snaith's Caribou project must be getting jealous, because the London-based producer has been spending more and more time with his Daphni alias of late, from his diverse edits on the Resista imprint to a collab with Four Tet for the latter's Text Records, to his mind-bending reworks of Carl Craig's "No Boundaries – Modular Pursuits."
Compared to those, "Ahora" actually sounds oddly restrained. As with most of his recent work under either alias, the drums are loose and the groove a little ragged; real hi-hats, banged out with real sticks and a loose grip, bob and weave around drum machine hits with a similar disdain for the quantized grid. Still, it never sounds sloppy, just agreeably slack. It's funk at its creakiest. You can tell that Snaith has been listening to his share of recent Border Community, because his gurgling, pinging synths have a super-saturated feel similar to Luke Abbott's queasy drones.
Appropriately, the Border Community artist Margot takes over remix duties on the flip. Remaining faithful to the spirit of the original, she nevertheless amplifies its proportions considerably, dialing up the bass and moving from a hazy ambient intro to a pumping one-two punch offset by faint triplets. (Where would Border Community be without their triplets?) Where the original skitters like a water beetle, Margot's mix hits with the deep, resounding oomph of a fat rock plunging through the surface of a lake. Despite their resolutely electronic underpinnings (save those hi-hats), both tracks feel refreshingly unstable, organic, and alive, without ever losing sight of the dance floor's requirements.
TracklistA Ahora
B Ahora (Margot Remix)