Hearing the word “remix” tagged on the end of a given song, you’d be forgiven for thinking that some DJ has taken said song, thrown a hip-hop or dance beat beneath it, done some perfunctory rearranging and added scratching or Kaos Pad filter sweeps to taste. At least, I’d like to think you’d be forgiven for that, since that’s the place my mind automatically goes when I see the word in question bound by parentheses.
But for Colorado-via-SF psych act Moon Duo, remixing seems to mean getting a handful of friends, label mates and genre contemporaries and saying, “Hey! Dudes! We aren’t sure these tracks are quite zoned-out enough. Could you lend us a hand?”
And a many hands they did lend.
Mazes Remixed finds seven of Moon Duo’s eight dirges from 2011’s Mazes tweaked by some of the most acid-washed and droney musicians of the last few decades.
A modified “Scars” leads off the record courtesy of the very able Sonic Boom — also known as Peter Kember, founding member of Spaceman 3. Kember, who has helmed the producer’s chair for Panda Bear and MGMT, also brings his spacey sentimentality to the record’s sixth track, “Fallout.”
Psychic Ills, Cave, Purling Hiss and Gary War also have their way with the Duo’s tracks, and Eagle Boston take their task one step further, recording a full-on cover of “Mazes” to close out the album.
Most of this stuff doesn’t stray too far from the original framework laid out by the San Francisco fuzz freaks, but any true fan will want to make sure to at least give it a listen.