Album Review

Nitin Sawhney – London Undersound Instrumentals & Remixes

• 23rd Oct 2009

The remix album has a long, often dubious history. Individual remixes, from rap’s block party roots to Norman Cook’s refashioning workaday indie into dance-rave crossovers have prospered, whilst across an LP for every ‘No Protection’ or ‘Echo Dek’ , you have 3 singles stretched across 15 DJ willthisdo remixes from the negligible to the blasphemous, uninspired or just aural crayon scrawling, most of which by one length or the other betray the original’s pearls of joy and the potential of the album format for cohesion and exploration.

And on Nitin Sawhney’s remixed new offering , the listener not only has the traditional travails of remix-den to chew on but instrumentals —10 of them— like one long force-fed watery appetiser.
The restaurant theme isn’t accidental. It sounds like the accompaniment that wont put you off the wine and minimalist cashew cream dish at that new mid-range Buddha-Yoga-insert your own- 7.30 special offer.

But suddenly this album strikes you like long buried realisations like electrodes bursting and spilling through your wine-haze in the soft candlelight’s eyes set to that muzak sitar background –emotions fill your veins, every perceptible. Whether from the original’s alchemy harnessed in some uncanny way or by complete reinvention—being relatively unfamiliar with Mr Sahwey’s music, opinion seems split—the remix section casts a deep and terrible and exciting pall over proceedings—taking us from wallpaper to wallbending, from comfortable shapes to living, sexy, dangerous cacophonies.

London Undergrounds’s prevailing vibes from then on are nothing less than the paranoid afterburn to the shivery lounge chills of Massive Attack’s Blue Lines/ Protection—or even the best instrumental preludes on Side A here. Somewhere between the first inklings of collapse, still surrounded by the rockpools and Eastern-inflected styling’s at a Persian bar night, with the familiar chatter over fusion sounds and scents but from beneath those charming designs soft terrors growing in the gullet, words being charged with a frazzled emotivity like accumulated storms as time starts to shudder, stretch and elasticate. That’s the spell of these remixes.

Though organic, a virtual concept album of a continuous night-mood narrative piece shifting through desire then dread, blurs then sharp green lights of the recovery room awash with watery coffee sobriety, Sawhey and his remix compadres cover the gamut of dance from technical head music to spine-tinglers to lung-trembling drill-downs and cool-eyed dancefloor hip shakers. Those dense soundtrack eastern lyres and snowchime scales, or, Those drum’ n bass interludes which surround them -chopping up the soft Elizabeth Fraser meets –Hope Sandoval vocals- initially seem trend-worn, 1997’s sound or exercises in corrosion rather than re-shaping. But just as the light and shade shifts imperceptibly from Eno-sparse strings to deafeningly oppressive things, so the wallpaper really does become mystical and those rhubarb and custard beat fractures suddenly sense amidst those smooth shroud sounds-conjuring numerous narratives—club judders and bass-trembles are spirals like Mesopotamian designs or internal bird flight cries.

Of course- ie on ‘Distant Dreams’- (Witty Boys remix)—this polyphonic London doesn’t always cohere, with the two-step suggesting the need to be inclusive of the whole spectrum, in this case jammed awkwardly into the seamless mood like a mistimed DJ glitch. But the mood recovers- and by ‘Shadowland’ we seem to have emerged- an optimism singed and soothed by fragile salve eastern coos– with electronic assuage and at the heart a vocal of la’s and cryptic knotted meanings expressed like early evening song, the hope of something ineffably pretty and wise after the night’s rush. But By Ek Jaan, fast approaching the morning, we’re flung back into minor chord territory, faintly erotic and with a night-club throb- but laced with a deep trepidation in this bhangra-electro banger lo-down filtered through frazzled nerve-stems first before we see it for just a trick, a story of the eyes. Loose limbed and circular with an electro-woosh gimmick, the wobbles and sirens are ultimately nerve-wracking despite all those honey assurances.

The stormclouds on its Cotti remix though come spiced with a sensitive piano chamber-quality and an unaffected sweetness wrapped around the scaling instruments fretting like violins in the Arabic mode. Beneath somewhere are grumbles, sampled voices as undertow, like those punctuating the swoonsome Sly on Protection, and like that song the remainder of the track soars. Then on closer Bring it Home we end with the albums two sides united in tension; breathy soul-coated girl voices rising to the surface against Doors-ian candle-mellatron inserts- shaded with the suspense and trace of strange dreams which preceded it whilst it stands dark-eyed blinking and languid in the caramel early morning. So, like life, very much an album of two sides.