Tabs Out | Diamondstein – American Electric: Remixes from Reflecting on a Dying Man

Diamondstein – American Electric: Remixes from Reflecting on a Dying Man

Am I allowed to reference a post on a website that’s dead at the moment? Like, even link to it? There’s not some sort of digital necrophilia involved or anything, I hope. I could probably go to jail for that. Regular necrophilia, not digital necrophilia. I’m going to assume digital necrophilia’s OK, actually.

So I wrote about Diamondstein’s “Reflecting on a Dying Man” over at Tiny Mix Tapes before it went belly-up (but maybe it’ll come back FINGERS CROSSED), and, yeah, it was a “heavy” lift, emotionally, as I mentioned there. That’s OK! Sometimes you need to burn yourself clean, get out the crud to get past it and on to better things. It was cathartic in that way. Depressingly cathartic.

Well, Doom Trip is back with a collection of remixes, with artists as diverse as the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well picking up where Diamondstein left off. And if you’re as excited as I am about the names you DO recognize, wait until you hear the tracks by the ones you DON’T! I’m talking Jas Shaw’s “2nd Floor Studio (13th Floor Mix),” a darkwave clanger slathered in synth that’s surprisingly propulsive. And Maral’s “Treachery of Language Remix” of “Rumors of Crime” brings the titular crime straight to the fore – but let’s not point fingers or anything, I’m not brave enough to be a whistleblower. Still, it’s as clanky and janky as a prison door slamming shut. Now THAT’S spooky!

And yeah, the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well do just fine too – but you KNEW that already.

Diamondstein also drops a new tune on here, “Empty in a Time of Need,” a pulse that slowly builds into a frigid cloud wall of opacity shot through with lasers. The lasers invigorate the clouds and make them glow. It’s like Laser Floyd at a Sunn O))) séance. He also appends his own “End Credits Remix” to “Someday You’ll Have This Too,” a music-box-y reimaging of the “Tron”-ified original, delicate, subtle, dreamy. It’s the perfect way to end this new one, a fresh take on something that certainly was never dead to begin with, nor in need of reinvigoration. Still, “Reflecting on a Dying Man” and “American Electric” together make for a fully energized and unified whole, so check em both out (but “American Electric more because it’s a tape, and this is a site for TAPES).

Edition of 120 out NOW on Doom Trip. Ohhhhhh boy!