When the Cinematic Orchestra dropped their debut album 'Motion' last year, they created a fuss. A group of young, studio-wise, instrument playing kids had managed to build a long player that shone with sophistication, sparkled with originality and sounded in fact like it had been created by a group of elder, highly accomplished musicians.
The secret was in the technique. Band leader J Swinscoe came up with the idea of sampling jamming sessions, sending those samples to the musicians and having them play over them again, and finally re-arranging these results into a uniquely cohesive whole.
Their consequent sound somewhere between futuristic jazz and soundtrack music has put them highly in demand as remixers, and this collection brings together some of their finest reworked moments to date.
Starting off with their uptempo reshaping of Faze Action's 'Moving Cities' - all syncopated drums and insouciant acoustics - we are taken through the various eclectic sounds that Swinscoe and his merry men have conjured up with their forward thinking mesh of live instrumentation and studio tecnhiques.
There's a bit of a cheat on track two as Cinematic actually get one of their own cuts remixed by Tom Tyler, who nonetheless turns in a fine job, ruffling up the edges a little while retaining the haunting beauty of the original.
Elsewhere, Kenji Eno gets his 'The Fear Theme' reworked into a wonderfully filmic cut with added percussion and deep double bass licks. Les Gammas' 'Guauanco' gets sonically re-sculpted into a haunting, jazzified affair and Piero Umiliani's 'Panoramica' becomes even more meditative and beguiling in C.O's hands.
Ending with their completely transmogrified version of 'Re-Arrange' by Bristol junglist Krust, 'Remixes' proves that there's pretty much nothing out there that The Cinematic Orchestra can't enhance.
