Aerial M's Post Global Music is an incredible CD.
The problem is, I don't know who to give the credit to.
Post Global Music is a remix CD-Aerial M's "Wedding Song No. 3" reworked by four entities from around the world.
So, here's the dilemma: Do I heap praise on Aerial M, the one-man show also known as Dave Pajo, who produced the source material for all the remixes? Pajo, formerly of Slint and Tortoise, has received kudos from all kinds of music press for his version of the 'post-rock' genre (post-rock=instrumental, atmospheric and loopy).
Or, do Flacco, Bundy K. Brown, DJ Your Food and the Tied and Tickled Trio deserve my adulation? After all, these songs are remixes, and exceptional ones at that. Each remix artist has taken the original material, (whatever it may sound like-it's not included on the disc) and so thoroughly changed it that they could argue the new material was theirs, not Aerial M's.
Flacco's "Wedding 3 Mix", the most immediately accessible of the lot, has a strong bass/drum line, some spacey effects and some great guitar. I assume the guitar is compliments of Pajo/Aerial M. The boy can play.
The Tied and Tickled Trio are, and I quote Pajo on this one, "a bunch of Germans." Sounds promising, right? For their mix they play live upright bass and sax over the tracks. It clocks in at a tidy 4:14, by far the shortest of the bunch.
Japan's DJ Your Food brings his sonic collage style to the table, simmering up a tasty batch of home cookin'. For lack of a better word, I'll say his mix is repetitive-but it works.
Bundy K. Brown's mix is aptly named "Attention Span Deficit Disorder Disruption; a journey wherein the Cheech Wizard seeks the gateway out of the world of red dust and learns that running between the raindrops won't save you from the Chocolate Thunder."
Oh, that Bundy K. Brown-he's so wacky. I'll coin a new term to describe this song: Headphone Rock. His 18-minute-plus mix meanders through all sorts of musical territory, moving left to right, crawling into your ear and then dropping off a mile away.
After listening to the four remixes, I began to understand their brilliance. Each mix had taken a separate crucial element from the original and distorted it with all means of electronic gadgetry so that it could stand on its own as a song.
In this case, the sum of the magnified parts is greater than the whole.
-By Josh Higgins
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