“Ghetto Kraviz”—Nina Kraviz’s take on a booty bass banger—was a highlight on her 2012 debut album. Almost five years later, the wistful track has become a modern-day classic, its hypnotically robotic vocal hook functioning like a bittersweet lullaby for a certain type of head. It’s hard to deny the simple charm of “Ghetto Kraviz,” which Kraviz describes to THUMP as a “very simple beat song with wonky vocals that you could have recorded yourself in the bathroom with your phone.” Now, the track is getting new life with two remixes from Madrid-based producer Regal on Radio Slave’s newly-relaunched label Rekids.
Kraviz tells THUMP that she made the original track in half an hour while playing around with a drum kit in her Moscow home studio. “Suddenly some really bold drum sequence shaped up. It reminded me of Dance Mania. I thought, ‘that’s what’s up,’ and through the speakers of my Mac recorded the first thing that came up to my mind: ‘Summer’s gone, I have come home, spring-ding down the stroke, spring-ding.’”
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“It sounded pretty raw, unrefined, and wonky, sometimes not in sync,” she continues. “You can still hear the background noise a bit. I thought something completely out of the blue would work really nicely as a contrast to this bold aesthetics, so I played a synth pad on top.”
As for Regal, the producer says he was motivated to give the track a rinse because “my ears were asking for something more techno.” He originally just used it in his sets, but after Kraviz picked it up, other people started asking for it too. Regal eventually recorded two remixes: the 808 and dub versions. The latter, which is streaming above, picks up a vocal that no one had used before, where Nina asks, “should I ask you something?”
“I thought, ‘Damn, I need to do something with this, it’s super cool,” Regal recalls. “So I made the dub version, going through the dark and dub techno. That one is my favorite at the moment.”
Nina Kraviz – Ghetto Kraviz (Regal Remixes) is out August 31, 2015 on Rekids
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