- Though Dan Bodan's honeyed tenor wouldn't sound out of place in a musical theatre production, last year's Soft suggested weirder allegiances. Leftfield electronic producers like Physical Therapy, M.E.S.H and Black Ocean's Ville Haimala were enlisted for production, leading to an intriguing, if not always convincing, collision of MOR-pop and thorny electronica. On this remix package, a more substantial followup to last year's Softy Soft Vol. I, Bodan gives the producers freer rein. There's a strong preference for a recombinant aesthetic here, pioneered by crews like Janus (two of the Berlin party's residents, Lotic and KABLAM, feature). Many of these artists thrive on daring collisions of sounds and ideas, and this EP is successful because they make no effort to tiptoe around their source material.
In places, Bodan's voice hardly features. Lotic's version of "Jaws Of Life" swaps it out for a mournful horn, with more poignant results than that description might suggest. Gobby's version of "Anonymous," meanwhile, is a barren technoid landscape reminiscent of Actress, Bodan's voice dissolved into whorls of desert dust. Elsewhere Bodan retakes centre stage, but the backdrops grow ever stranger. KABLAM tackles "Reload," whose perky drum & bass beat was one of Soft's odder inclusions. She heightens the dislocation, pairing Bodan's Disney-fied delivery with a barrage of shattering glass. Draveng's second stab at the mawkish "Romeo," following an effort on Vol I, is a triumph of dub sonics. Finally, E+E re-imagines "A Soft Opening" as funereal videogame music, before segueing into an unexpected folkish coda. We're some distance from Bodan's home turf here, but the view is refreshing.
Tracklist01. Jaws of Life (Lotic Remix)
02. Reload (KABLAM Reload Upload Remix)
03. Anonymous (Gobby Remix)
04. Romeo (Draveng Rosa Undercover Edition)
05. A Soft Opening (E+E Remix)