bittersweet-archive

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Like many of the remixes par excellence, Mike Rish's work was brought to me by the high school friend (a fellow longtime Bittersweet devotee) who first introduced me to the allegedly-Moby piece.

Mr. Rish puts in yeoman's work mixing the song into a delicious and effulgent layer cake. I mean the metaphor deliberately, and I hope to carry it forward. Every level of noise in this piece is pleasing, and each, in turn, has its time to shine before coalescing.

The standout here is the synth arpeggios that jump in just before the 3 minute mark. 

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Apparently the dubstep of the previous mix was poorly encoded and got all glitchy for this. No complaints here, though. The phasing, pulsing, jumping, switching, skipping, fractured bass makes the reptile-me want to stop writing--stop thinking--and just dance like a malfunctioning robot until I collapse, my circuits overloaded with infectious bittersweet bass.

Overblown preamble aside, there are a couple choice notes I want to tease out.

4:20 runtime lulz dat’s a gud 1

At 2:59, there is a brief burst of pure drum and bass. I like this tongue-in-cheek play. I don’t ascribe any significance (it isn’t reaching out beyond the piece to meaningfully make the listener think of some other thing), it’s just a pleasurable flash, like a poker playing shuffling cards in overwrought patterns.

The producer is unafraid to play with the vocals. The latter half of the song sees “bittersweet” warped and repeated. This so seldom happens, and I love it when the vocals are altered. Here that plaintive bittersweet underlies so much techno-chaos, adding a strand of consistency to the spiraling sonic malfunctions.

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I'll admit, I’m not a dubstep apologist. Being the supercilious jerk I am, I find a lot of dubstep to be lowest-common-denominator, paint-by-numbers electro-nonsense. This however, this I like.

Perhaps in keeping with my lukewarm dubstep feelings, I think the best parts are not the most wubwubwub-esque moments. Instead, the drifting, twanging synth that backs the melody's classic line (and, beautifully, comes to prominence in the final minute) is so finessed an extraction.

But also there are some dirty drops. And I won’t deny my id the fun of rolling around and reveling in a sludgy bass morass every now and then.

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This remix exploded into my Bittersweet explorations, and it remains a treasured find of mine. Unlike "Bittersweet Dirt Off Your Shoulder," there is little link between the wilting string aria and the absolutely buck-wild rap samples (drawn, I believe, from multiple songs). But the energy of the vocals and the driving drum beat undergird the uptempo strings and turn the wilting into a high-energy torrent.

The song teases as much, it's opening playing with ubiquitous electronic techniques before the rap samples burst into the music. I can't stress enough how much I love the sampling here. The injection of the krunk refrains, that killer call-and-response, into Bittersweet Symphony is so intoxicating. To  experience something that new was a humbling experience. In DJ Chillbreak's masterwork some small sliver of the sublime flowers in the music. The dynamism and energy of the rap, excessive and unbound, was beyond what I considered the scope of Bittersweet. 

It is the rare remix that provides the unique pleasure of shattering expectations.

Note: of course, the second half of the song, drawing on another song, is a nice coda, and it sustains the energy of the first movement well, but it is inferior.

P.S.: mea culpa readers, I have no idea where the rap samples come from. This personal failing haunts me.

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Beyond the foundation of DJ Quicksilver and Bittersweet Dirt Off Your Shoulder, the silt of NewGrounds yields up an impressive addition to my early Bittersweet expedition, drum and bass style. I don’t know who Corn and Beans is, but, better than Quicksilver, he is able to blend, move, mix, elide the wilting pathos of the classic strings with pulsing techno bass. Revel in the escalation from 1:01 to 1:52, with its intoxicating layers. Embrace the ensuing denouement which sees the pseudo-dubstep throb dissolve into a club-standard, ass-shaking thrum.

As much as I admire the facial blending of the strings and the electronics, the song shines at the 2:22 mark. Original composition erupts. The sublime tones evinced by the string refrain are twisted into new forms and now growl with a ferocious tragedy. This techno-organic melody previously lurked in the background, behind the more prominent instruments, but it is unleashed to devastating effect here.

I do have one complaint, however. The build before the final drop is limp. The overall composition's layering aspires towards decadence—and such decadence does not contrast with, but abhors the penultimate windswept sonic conservatism. This spare sliver does not tease or lead, it drags, painfully.

In this, the work serves as an object lesson: do not forsake strengths in favor of conventions or "clever" composition. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

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In a more autobiographical, and less exegetical, turn, I now reveal my first experience with a reordering of Bittersweet Symphony. Torn from some long-forgotten file-sharing site, and slapped with Moby's name (alleged, and certainly see below) this remix was a revelation when I first heard it.

In fact-checkable reality, DJ Quicksilver is responsible for the mix, and its actual title is "Water Verve." (Who knew? Not my high school self pretending to rave as I drove to school, for sure.)

The highlight of the piece is the reverberating strings that make a brief appearance at 2:24, leading to the final drive. It's a cliched techno move, but when it's done well, as in here, I don't begrudge its use. Peering deeper, I like two parts of this particular strand of the song. First, it matches well with the frantic high-hat drum machine that appears earlier, replicating that backing frenzy in the song's central instrument. But beyond this technical pleasure, it is fun to hear the notes of Bittersweet Symphony played with so. It is the charm of rotoscopes and flipbooks: just as we know what things in motion look like but still find that archaic, prosaic replication enjoyable (in part because of its charmingly limited replication), so too here. We know what strings are supposed to sound like, and throughout Water Verve we've heard them with techno backing, but in this instance the electronic manipulation overtakes the sentimentality; we experience the alteration of that which we know so well.

The remix climaxes in this moment, with the act of re-mixing existing on every layer of sound.

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Naturally, the starting point of this collection is the seminal Jay-Z mashup. This wasn't my first taste of Bittersweet permutations, but regardless of where it stands in one's experience, it masterfully pulls out the tragic beauty of the Verve's underlying instrumentals by gilding them with Jay-Z's rap. The lyrics not only have the the same quasi-tragic relentless sound of the strings, but the content of Jay-Z's rhymes taps the same bittersweet vein of The Verve's original lyrics.

A critical note, this mashup doesn't totally eschew Ashcroft's vocals (a common omission), which in this instance highlight Hov's rap so well. While the Verve track favors the bitter half of the equation, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" comes down the other way: it is cognizant of the bitter, but revels in the sweet that has been achieved.

This is why, of all the permutations that exist, "Bittersweet Dirt Off Your Shoulder" is so canonical, not only in this blog's chosen world but in the larger mashup world. Here, perfectly, the Verve's base is mirrored in the overlay. A facet of the essence of the mashup--syncretic combination that enhances the drawn-upon elements--is made manifest in the mix.

It is a case study in perfection.