Japan's Silent Poets (Michiharu Schimoda and Tkhiro Haruno) recently released their wonderfully brooding album, 'To Come'. It's sensitive combination of orchestral strings, urban poetry, hip hop motifs and detached loneliness earned it accolades from all sides.
Not content with coming up with one highly listenable long player though, the duo have decided to deliver a remixed version that offers all the songs to various remixers and changes the vibe entirely. Pretty much all the tracks get reworked with the exception of 'the corner'. Yellow's Tom and Joyce take care of 'Come Raising', turning it from a dub-house entity into a gorgeous, ultra-chilled groove.
The skeletal down tempo beats of 'Where The Sidewalk Ends' are superceded by King Britt's tougher broken house jam which lend another angle to Kirsty Hawkshaw's exquisite vocals, while The Mighty Bop removes the elegiac strings of 'Someday' and replaces them with a summery hip hop groove.
Nu skool soulsters Spacek keep hold of the orchestral vibe of 'Prisons' but add their own twisted soul sonics while the formidable 2 banks of 4 also rework the track into a subtler, more complacent affair.
Restless Soul re-sculpt 'Save The Day' and french house producer Julien Jabre deals formally with 'To Come', adding some dope beatwork.
It all makes for a less dramatic, more insouciant and generally more danceable and uplifting version of the album which, amazingly, sounds almost as good as the impressive original.
