Marc Bianchi has been recording his heart-on-sleeve dreamscapes under the name Her Space Holiday for almost 8 years now. He's toured with everyone from Bright Eyes to Bob Mould and each album under his moniker has grown slightly more electronic, with more elaborate productions and ideas. The Young Machines Remixed is sort of the next logical step in that progression, with a huge variety of artists given one track each from the aforemenionted album (Young Machines) to deconstruct and reconstruct as they see fit. The result is a completely mixed batch of tracks from a huge name of artists that manage to stay true to the original album and take it in new directions at the same time.
In some cases, remixers remove the voice of Bianchi alltogether, and in the case of "Tech Romance" by Matmos, complete succeed at what they do. Moving with layered loops of chimes, horns and micro-strings, the track progresses like some sort of phase-pattern Steve Reich track, staying fragile and beautiful without saying a single word. Blockhead and The Album Leaf also strip their remixes ("Meet The Pressure" and "The Young Machines" respectively), but don't succeed quite as well, turning in fairly nice tracks that basically sound like pieces they'd have originally done themselves.
Stereolab manages to completely turn "Girl Problem" on its ear, mixing lo-fi guitars and organs with the original vocals (which are quite dark), creating an oddly sunny that breathes with bitterness while Nobody morphs "From South Carolina" into a dirty, krunky track with filtered vocals that lumbers along effectively to close out the release. Elsewhere, Broken Spindles does a fairly standard ProTools jacked-up mix of "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" and DNTEL offers up a super-fluffy (and quite lovely) version of "Japanese Gum" that emphasizes the lonely vocals and punctuates them with Tamborello's usual flair. As a whole, the album works quite well and features a good variety of sounds from a wide range of remixers (others include Arab Strap, Super Furry Animals, and Boom Bip). Very fun.
