Originally released in 1992, with it's bubbling dub bass line, intermittent breaks, haunting synths, monastic vocal choral samples, delayed keyboard lines and swooping, breathless chords, 'Papua New Guinea' both lead and reflected its time in the developing world of dance music.
Joining the dots between techno, ambient house, world music, post rave culture and the already diverse break beat scene, it crossed over from the dance world to just miss the top 20 and at least to a degree justified the pretensions of Gary Cobain and Brian Dougan's band name.
Now, after a four-year break since their Wipeout theme tune, 'We Have Explosive', graced the charts , the duo have returned to 'Papua New Guinea' and twisted its template into seven new variations.
'Papsico' picks up where the original left off, working the keyboards around the ambient break, fine tuning the production details and building the atmospheric aspects of the track.
'The Lovers', with its wah guitar and bass line, is pitched somewhere between a Seventies funk detective film and Star Trek series one. That is until the guitar rocks out into a clumsy solo towards the end.
'Wooden Ships' is a more experimental, jazz breaks based affair that, with it's indie delayed guitar effects, may be a little too fusionist for its own good. But it acts is perfectly surreal foil to the psychedelic big beat of 'The Great Marmalade In The Sky'.
The plucked guitar and harmonica of 'Requiem' kills the pace but otherwise the track, all mermaid vocals and plinking piano, is little better than its title would imply.
There is probably a very good reason for choosing to name the next song 'Things Change Like The Patterns And Shades That Fall From The Sun', if you've got the time and patience to hear the story. As a track it's as atmospheric as you'd expect but by this point suffers from the album's lack of variation in mood, the biggest feature being the stabbing guitar and drum boom that heralds the start of every fourth bar.
Finally the saxophone and sitar-led 'The Big Blue' brings the album to rest in a deep slumber.
