- Kenneth Bager appears to have almost single-handedly re-colonised the chill-comp, or at the very least, created a coolsie compartment for himself in it. His Balearic Biscuits mixes redo Café del Mar for the DFA generation – and I don’t necessarily mean this as a diss, either. His debut album Fragments from a Space Cadet is pretty good, too. It takes the moods of his mixes (chilled, colourful, poptronic) for a random walk through Bager’s own dreamy headspace – and it’s a pleasant place to be.
One of the collaborative results that featured on the album was ‘The First Picture’, which presents a flower-plaited sonic frame for Julee Cruise’s candy vocal style. The song has a very early nineties feel – a touchpoint might be Bjork’s ‘Hyperballad’, if only for the strings and the vibe. It’s a sunny tune with the edge of self-consciously ironic/non-ironic pop smarts that appears to be highly developed among a lot of Scandanavian artists.
To the remixes: DJ Volume turns in a cheerfully minimalist rendition, the whole she-bang shorn of vocals and most of the strings (which return under a restraining order enforced with aggressive filtration). Again, there’s a slight early 90s feel carried on the drum loop (give it a year and it’ll start getting skippy and turn jungle). But it hasn’t quite yet, and it doesn’t really do anything else. Nice feel, but underwhelming. The Idjut Boys remix is worse: a dull, seven minutes of EBM squeezed into a gloomy nowhere. Not much to see/hear, folks. Maybe it was a "dark sunglasses" reaction against all that sunshine? But there is some slight redemption on offer via Jesse Rose’s remixes, which add a big funk clap and turn the original into a swinging, driving, hip-housey number. The vocal version cuts and stutters the vocal in Rose’s tasteful fidget style; the instrumental makes a useful tool for house DJs. Over to an Outkast lyric for the sum-up: "love’s lukewarm lullaby".
Tracklist1 Fragment Two (The First Picture) (Jesse Rose Remix)
2 Fragment Two (The First Picture) (DJ Volume Remix)
1 Fragment Two (The First Picture) (Version Idjut)
2 Fragment Two (The First Picture) (Jesse Rose Instr)