When Lesley Rankine, and her band Ruby, was signed to Work (a Sony Music imprint) she released a couple of different discs that included remixes from her wonderful Salt Peter album. Even though Ruby is now on a much smaller independent label, I was pleased to see that Rankine chose to release remixes of songs from her fine album Short Staffed At The Gene Pool. Eleven different remixers, including Rankine herself, tried their hands at seven different songs from the disc with impressive results. Some of the remixes, such as Dot Allison’s remix of “Beefheart,” Bench’s retro soul mix of “Lamplight,” Her Space Holiday’s remix of “Grace,” and Console’s loopy remix of “Sweet Is,” are more accessible than others. However, even the most difficult remixes, such as the “Lilypad” remix by Kid 606, show thought and creativity and are worth hearing.
Being a DJ and having to come up with new continuous mix compilations is probably a little bit like being a music reviewer and having to come up with new things to say about continuous mix compilations. Eddie Baez is a DJ whose continuous mix compilations, including DJ Eddie Baez: Vol. 2 (Logic), his second, are better than most. The inclusion of tunes by Lucrezia (her respectful dance cover of Madonna’s “Live To Tell”) and Kristine W (“Lovin You”) are good examples of Baez’s taste in dance music divas. Baez even managed to make Da Buzz (“Let Me Love You Tonight”) tolerable, sandwiching them as he did between DJ RK (“Horizon”) and Taiko (“Silence”). This mix disc is the next best thing to being there, whatever that means.
A musical and mathematical meeting of the minds, the Truby Trio combines the talents of DJ Rainer Truby with Christina Rommer and Roland Appel (of Fauna Flash). The sum of Truby Trio’s parts has produced DJ-Kicks (K7), an exotic mix disc featuring jazzed-up house contributions from Matthaus (“Scat Box”) and Korova (“Some People”), bold Brazilian rhythms of Block 16 (“Find An Oasis”), Afronaught (“Transcend Me”), Voom: Voom (“Ginger & Fred”), and Lehner & Bibel (“Toronto”), as well as an originals track by Fauna Flash (“Tel Aviv”) and two (!) Truby Trio originals (the appropriately titled “High Jazz” and the Zero db remix of “Galicia”).