- A few weeks ago Kiran Sande asked, "When was the last time you listened to a Cadenza record the whole way through?" While my answer was "a few days ago," I get the point. The venerated imprint ain't what it used to be. Luckily, challengers are rising to the occasion. Among the best is Valencia's Barraca Music whose in-house producer Affkt has seen his star rise immeasurably in the past few months on the back of a slate of productions that sound a lot like a direction that Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano could have taken.
It's a testament to Barraca's already high profile that they've locked in both artists to this remix package, one which houses some of their most straight-ahead and satisfying work in ages. Villalobos comes first, taking on Danny Fiddo's & Affkt's "Points" and pushing the track even further into a menacingly abstract corner where Latin vocals don't sound tired, liquid synths buoy a tight yet elastic groove and every single moment of its nearly 16-minute length seems absolutely necessary. In other words, classic Villalobos.
Luciano's rework of "Cartas Para Geisha" is more straightforward. (It's all relative in this case.) Unlike Villalobos' mix—where the emphasis seems to shift constantly from percussion to bassline to voice to some weird noise that you can't quite place—the key is the unrelenting bassline which is a Sisyphean bit of programming in that it climbs every few seconds...only to fall all the way back down again. Plenty of things happen around it, but like any great minimal techno track from Luciano's past, you can't quite shake that hook. Nor would you want to.
Tracklist A Danny Fiddo & Affkt - Points (Villalobos Una Puta Más Atrás Remix)
B Affkt & Danny Fiddo - Cartas Para Geisha (Falto Pepica Luciano Mix)