RIFF MARKET

Download: Digitalism's "Jupiter Room (Martian Assault Edit)"

Sorry to break from my positivity streak but goddamn this new Kitsune comp--what the shit? I read something like this piece and really want to believe "Maison 2 seems poised to take the ruins left in the wake of Daft Punk and pulverize whatever chunks were inadvertently left behind," which the author says is a good thing. But please please please tell me the future of 1997 isn't MSTRKRFT79 remixing Wolfmother or yet another terrible remix of "Banquet" that's so bad I think I might actually like the original now. Haven't we learned our lesson?

Previous riffs have come to the defense of indierock dance parties--not because people were dancing to rock music, and in fact especially not that. We all have been to a Barenaked Ladies show and know exactly what high school girls will do if they had a million dollars. Thing was, you get the right indierockdance DJ and she can move you pretty much effortlessly from rock to actual house to actual disco and maybe you find out you "don't need six strings to get down" (actual quote). I say "actual" merely to mean house qua house, not some sort of housified rock or discofied rock, because the best of these parties were working frontline to dismantle rock-as-normative music, and I thought that project had merit.

Fitting then that the first time I heard a Kitsune Maison 2 track was at one of Erol Alkan's NYC gigs last week. Alkan didn't spin it; I think it might have been before-Alkan DJ Dave P who pulled out Digitalism's "Jupiter Room (Martian Assault Edit)" which plays (gloriously) like a Homework track with the mids alternately clipped or blown out. It's one of the best tracks Kitsune's ever put out, and definitely a top10er 2006 for me so far. The rest of Alkan's night though was predominantly that really forced, rest of KM2 sound--hookless rock put on the rack of a steady fourbeat, a bunch of records wearing stick-on moustaches and thinking that we won't know the difference or worse--that dancified rock is all we really wanted in the first place. It's not philosophical opposition to one-pass "make me something I'm not" rock remixes--but maybe that's exactly what it is. Mostly I feel icky listening to the bad ones, and pretty bored, and confused as to what the motivations are for, say, Wolfmother to want a clubgoing audience when I've seen the tail that guy pulls without.