philip sherburne

Battles' angular, low-slung "Atlas" sounds a lot like T. Rex as filtered through Kompakt's idea of T. Rex, all compressed radio frequencies and crudely truncated guitar samples, spun back out into something limber and muscular and rockingly skintight. So commissioning Kompakt's own DJ Koze to remix the tune feels particularly inspired. Koze bucks expectations by producing not a Schaffel version of the same (which, let's face it, would have been way too easy) but instead a lumbering house number with more than a little of hip-hop's boom-bip impulse in its uneasy bounce. Hyperspeed samples (of what, God knows) become bright, chiming keyboard melodies outfitted with fluttering ornaments; where Battles' vox are sped up like Ritalinized rodents, Koze screws them down til they're nothing but a druggy mantra. Charged with electric dissonance and a humming, high-wire clave pattern, the whole track feels like a cross section of moments caught between opposite motions: powering up, pitching down, hitting the "de" in the loop-de-loop. It's like that old school film explaining atomic energy with a chain reaction of ping-pong balls and mousetraps, with the film paused exactly at the point where every orb reverses direction: that lyrical, that improbable, and that pregnant. (Listen to the original here; listen to Koze's remix here).