★★★☆☆
Altering the best bits of the Tuning Echoes and Temporary Happiness LPs, Mock & Toof’s Duncan Stump and Nick Woolfson get their remix tables turned into a satisfying portmanteau.
A sundry stew of the pair’s humble, DIY house and electronic pop bent leftwards, without the ingredients scaling too big a cookbook, a mixture of cosmic disco is built with both a speckle of sand (“Norman’s Eyes”, as seen through by Massimiliano Pagliara) and steely, fine-tuned edges. When measuring degrees of emotional pull, Wolf & Lamb’s easy as pie ambient seesaw could well have you blubbering at their complete reinvention of “Shoeshine Boogie.”
Blundetto furnishes the pair with dusty dub, and featuring its own compare and contrast, Kink & Neville Watson (acid with an electro-pop ear, retaining the vocal) and Sling & Samo (empty, lumpy techno that sounds like it could break into Riverside at any moment, vocal-free) both remix the previously quaint “Farewell to Wendo.”
The revision of a little tenderness (Kalabrese), the experimental within a safety net (Tiago) and artists picking what’s right for them (DMX Krew) contribute to the shaping of what is a scour pad of a collection. Rough and smoother sides both present, better known names and less so as well, it’s a set holding its end up independently from the source and doing all three projects justice.
File under: Hot Chip, DFA, Mickey Moonlight