Black Strobe - 'A Remix Selection' (Playlouder) Released 04/12/06

Dance remixes can be a hit and miss brew. Get it right and you can far surpass the original, cleverly utilising its strengths and giving it a unique edge that adds a third dimension to the track. Get it wrong and you can be faced with a lazily constructed cut and paste job where the end product is ultimately just dance beats pasted over the master version. Thankfully Black Strobe never have such problems. In Ivan Smagghe and Arnaud Rebotini, the French duo are very much two of the hottest producers on the scene, and more importantly the pair don’t simply remix tracks, instead they obliterate them and reconstruct them into gurn inducing monsters. Featuring primarily their most respected re-workings of recent years, ‘A Remix Selection’ is a fine showcase of their talent.

Perhaps one of the intrinsic strengths of the album is the choice of tracks that Black Strobe chose to toy with. A varied palette, the collection ranges from the abrasive industrial rock of Rammstein’s ‘Keine Lust’ to the camp disco imbued grooves of the Martini Bros’ ‘The Biggest Fan’ - given a fitting gritty techno makeover and a fluffy über French house remix respectively. In between, we every dance producer’s favourite band Depeche Mode with ‘Something To Do’, that gets stripped down to a throbbing electro number with Dave Gahan’s urgent vocal cleverly retained in its original quality. While, Caretta, Hacker and Millimetric’s formidable ‘Moscow Reisen’ is slowed down from its first guise and transformed into a minimal tech-tinged offering.