The remix is the quintessential dance club tool. The rearranging and augmenting of songs to enhance their ability to shake bottoms not only results in the sale of more albums, but adds convenient b-sides to the maxi-single as well. The remix makes occasional waves in noise and experimental music, though it serves a purpose far removed from the remixes of dance, hip-hop, or industrial tracks. While remixes of these genres tend to latch onto the song’s more recognizable bits and play on them for maximum effect, the sound sources for noise remixes tend to be more anonymous, and the transformations less transparent. This artists on this disc, which features eleven re-workings of material from John Wiese’s Magical Crystal Blah cd, not only do a competent job of recycling Wiese’s music, but make a positive statement about the usefulness of the remix album all in one fell swoop.
Few listeners are going to recognize specific selections of Wiese’s material in Magical Crystal Blah Volume 2, the disc’s most obvious source material isn’t even Wiese, but instead Panicsville’s appropriation of the intro to Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” As this cd proves, though, the best remix projects are those that construct new pieces altogether, not novelty versions or hyperactive dance tracks, and people like KK Null, Panicsville, Mike Shiflet, and Damion Romero do that in spades. The resulting tracks have similarities to Wiese’s original album, sometimes in a volatile unpredictability, or an abundance of harsh static, but these eleven remixes each have a distinct personality of their own and Zbigniew Karkowski’s cacophonic reworking of Wiese’s music is a far cry from Mike Shilflet’s subtle buzz. Freiband reduce Wiese’s music to an almost inaudible, rough-edged twinkle, while Damion Romero tends to a pack of popping clicks and blips, like a metallic rainfall heard over the AM dial.
In the end, crediting this album to Wiese may not seem apropos, since the music is so obviously stamped with the marks of its surrogate parents. But, rather than a quibble over classification, this is more a testament to the individual voices of Wiese’s manipulators, who certainly steal the show.
