By the trundling false-starts, erratic thuds and empty scrawls of shining synth and vocal sample etchings, it certainly does seem that in 'Shanghai' Swiss producer Feldermelder achieved the goal of reflecting a late night walk through a deserted area of the Chinese megacity. Based on a visual recording of that experience ("an attempt to capture nightly nothingness," wrote Feldermelder), 'Shanghai' glitches, squawks and buzzes throughout the track, a noisy, gleaming morsel with a mood ripe for remixing.
On that remix is long-time friend, Beijing-based producer and sound designer Shao. "It was last summer, on a rainy morning, I was drinking on the rooftop beside my studio," Shao remembers. "I got the message from Manuel [Oberholz, aka Feldermelder], asking me to remix a track that he did in China."
Creating the remix was as simple as stripping the original track bare and then processing them with "some effects pedals, some delays" whilst adding a drum beat that matched the atmosphere.
"I just followed the feeling and the atmosphere and made a relaxing track," Shao, formerly known as Dead J, explains simply. Though focused recently on techno-flavoured production (see Shao's Doppler Shift Pt. 1), he decided to change things up for this remix.
The result is unrelaxing. A doomful doppelganger of the original, a doped dirge of surging drama like an undersea cave, a mirror to the mire of irony of lonely deserted streets in a huge city, crushing isolation told in drawn out growls of distortion and warped glitter.
And the beat, a sparse march of organic thuds, gives it a feeling of techno deconstructed, four-to-the-floor-minus-two, simultaneously creating – along with the teasing rise and fall of the synth waves – a sense of something about to teeter over the edge.
- 🔔 This Shao remix of 'Shanghai' arrives ahead of Feldermelder's The Sound Of Remixes, out tomorrow 19th April on Zurich label -OUS. This release sees three tracks from the Swiss artist's 2018 The Sound Of EP. You can pre-order the remix EP here.
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