Sun Electric: Toninas Remixes
Shitkatapult

Five years after Sun Electric's “Toninas” appeared on Source Records' 2002 comp opensource.code as well as on the recent Lost & Found (1998 - 2000) collection, the tune gets a couple of nice makeovers by Ricardo Villalobos and the tag team of Thomas Fehlmann and Daniel Meteo. The latter pair transforms the original's easy, broken beat swing into an initially hiccupping skank that grows progressively smoother and hazier with each passing second. Their “early morning" treatment subtly reconfigures the original without losing its ambient flow. Anyone familiar with Villalobos's work won't be surprised to find him radically dissecting and then re-assembling the tune and filtering in traces of Lost & Found's final track,“Afterglow,” in the process. With see-sawing loops and aquatic and spacey noises swirling over a steady bass drum pulse, “Toninas” becomes virtually unrecognizable. The emergence of a bass clarinet-like line calls to mind Ornette's Free Jazz and Miles's Bitches Brew and, though Villalobos's thirteen-minute version is obviously unlike those recordings in multiple respects, it does share with them a free-flowing design where instruments and sounds swim within a dense, parabolic mix.

January 2008