- Tiga seems determined to keep people guessing. Last year's Ciao! toggled between rave bangers, indie dance and eclectic electro pop; now he recruits fellow Canadian Mathew Jonson, Dial stalwart Efdemin and, strangest of all, Dutch dubstepper Martyn to rework "Gentle Giant," the most out-of-character cut on the album.
Tiga's song was a Schaffel lullaby built of organs and billowing, overdubbed vocals, and the three remixers' approach to the material couldn't be more different. Matthew Jonson translates the original's cadence to swinging 6/8 time, and, save for the vocals, it sounds less like a remix than a remake, with Tiga's parts loosely rescored for Jonson's collection of analog and modular synthesizers. (A dub version, which does away with the vocals, sounds like 100% Jonson.) As with Jonson's recent Agents of Time, the track makes the most out of a handful of elements, tweaking filters and throwing gentle kinks into repeated sequences. But it's hardly his most exciting work.
Efdemin doesn't exactly distinguish himself here either, especially not after his recent remixes for VSQ and Pantha du Prince, not to mention his album Chicago. He lays out a dirty tech-house groove around a monotone bass throb and loosely overlapping hi-hats, using a single, slow-moving chord as tone color. A single vocal phrase ("One step and a little touch/ Can change the way you feel tonight") soaks up the breakdown, anticlimactically, and then we're back in the game, with an additional set of blippy chords to mark the shift. A nice, dry rimshot adds a bit of bite, but it's not a track that stands out or sticks with you.
The most interesting remix is Martyn's, which is also the most outré, thanks to the way he's re-sampled Tiga's vocals into a wordless chorus that apes Thom Yorke's slippery, agonized delivery. The groove, heavily swung and punctuated by stabbing, syncopated keys, is far slower than we're used to from Martyn; the tempo falls in the mid 120s, and it's not overly interested in forward motion. From the mixdown to the swollen arrangement to the chiming chords, it sounds like a downcast answer to "Strings of Life," heavy-hearted, but not quite ready to give up.
トラックリスト A1 Gentle Giant (Martyn's Heaven Remix)
A2 Gentle Giant (Efdemin Remix)
B1 Gentle Giant (Mathew Jonson Dub)