Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos has turned in two remixes ahead of Prins Thomas’s Principe Del Norte Remixed album, which arrives tomorrow (October 14) via Smalltown Supersound.
Villalobos is well known for stretching his source material into meandering mini-epics that challenge the notion of space and time, but when it comes to Principe Del Norte cut “C,” he already had a lot to work with, given the original’s nearly 14-minute span. One would think a track like that is fair game for a half-hour remix (at least), but somehow Villalobos’s “King Crab” remix and “Knodel Prince” dub clock in at shorter run-times, though both are equally winding with different results: the former is a robust slice of trippy, minimal tech house that seems to stay at one mid-energy setting throughout, while the latter slowly unravels into silent nothingness. Listen to them below.
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A remix album is a rare occasion for Thomas, who throughout his career has rarely had his work filtered through the lens of others despite having made nearly 300 remixes himself for artists including Hieroglyphic Being, Actress, Lauer, Jaga Jazzist, and Todd Terje. “My music already sounds a bit ‘remixed’ in the first place and I often consider it more as a mass of sound rather than actual songs that could be reinterpreted from what I’ve already done,” he stated in a press release. “I also usually have an alternate version of each track ready myself…”
“Anyway, I made an exception and told [Smalltown Supersound founder] Joakim that if we’re going to do remixes, I want to go all out and ask a broad spectrum of producers that I admire; producers who could contribute with a vivid imagination and a wider range of sounds.”
Principe Del Norte Remixed also includes contributions from The Orb, Gerd Janson, Young Marco, Sun Araw, and Thomas himself.
