Shortly after I moved to Boston & started visiting the many DJ -centric record shops on the weekly & producing lo-fi Electronic Music tracks in the Berklee labs afterhours, I became obsessed with Remixes; as a way to exercise completely separate trains of thought & production-identities from the music I was forging on my own. This was a fantastic moment in time (generational wisdom, sure, but the mid-late 90s really were special) & there was always some conceptual slant that I was able to introduce to keep things interesting. That I was lucky enough to carry these out at near-professional levels for a good decade before burning out in the mid-2000s is something of a miracle & this is at the root of what was so great about the just-pre-broadband-internet Electronic Music scenes: the ease & willingness of collaboration & camaraderie. Some of my all-time favorite moments in music were when I was able to slightly to vastly recast other musicians & bands’ ideas via sampler & sequencer & bridge the gap.

When the smoke had cleared after a good decade of working with virtually everyone that had been in touch, I was astonished to find that I had produced over 30 separate remixes. At first these were just for friends & family: my “No Wave” band El-Ron was first on the chopping block, folowed my brother Brian’s Blitter project & I was very happy to work on mixes for collaborators in the Boston & Toneburst scenes: Jake Trussell’s Electro Organic Sound System, Jace Clayton’s pre- DJ /Rupture project Nettle, & Sam Brelsfoard’s Soplerfo all got the Hrvatski cut-up treatment before a series of regional IDM-adjacent artists & labels got in touch: Glasgow collective Diskono wrote in about reworking The Clash’s “I”m So Bored With The USA” for a compilation LP & re-productions of music for Fluoroscopic Kid, V/Vm, N.W.A. via Kid606, Lucky Kitchen’s Suetsu & Underwood, & Chicago group Salvo Beta were soon to follow.

In & between all of this, I had the hare-brained idea to also solicit remixes of my own productions as heard on the “Attention: Cats” LP; emboldened with a comprehensive P&D deal by then-employer Forced Exposure I compiled, designed, & manufactured several thousand copies of a 35-track CD selection, “rkk13cd.” In addition to appearances by Reckankomplex residents Andrei “Drusca” Smarandoiu, Andy “A.Solo” Solomon, and others I was happy to receive pieces by many heroes then & now: Farmer’s Manual, Fennesz, Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, Peter “Pita” Rehberg [R.I.P.], Pimmon, Push Button Objects, Solvent, and even Wayne & Kate from Twisted Village (recorded slyly under the alias Sister Sunshine DJ Planar 78). The entire project was an unmitigated disaster from ship to shore (the check I wrote to Sterling Sound for the 4-hour mastering session bounced; an omen of things to come) and while it seemed to sell well across multiple pressings (mint green, then magenta ASCII art covers) the accounting for the entire project was frozen in the closure of Caroline’s US Distribution arm & neither I nor FE (let alone any of the artists) were paid for all of our hard work.

As all of these steadily trickled into the world, the invitations to work on theme & variation projects in more varying International contexts started coming in fast & loose: Norbert Schilling [R.I.P.] asked me for a rework of Conrad Schnitzler’s [R.I.P.] “Rot” LP (easily one of my all-time favorites, and the first thing I recommend to people seeking out “Electronic Krautrock”), Toby “DJ Scud” Reynolds from Ambush asked on behalf of St. Gallen’s own Cracked Everyday Electronics phenoms Voice Crack (for which I did two completely different remixes; a burbling Minimal Synth number & a full-on Breakcore Electro-Acoustic Improv… a few years later Norbert Möslang & I would play a series of duo & trio concerts in Electro-Acoustic Improvisational settings), Kim Cascone wanted both a piece for a Computer Music Journal compilation and a remix of his Pulsar Synthesis work, both of which I turned in.

This reached critical mass when I began branching out to different scenes; I ended up doing remixes for & playing on tracks by several groups from within the Anticon collective in Oakland: Themselves, Subtle, and 13 & God, plus couple of rock bands including God Is My Co-Pilot, Neon Hunk, Oren Ambarchi & Chris Townsend’s Sun, and even short-lived UK chart-toppers Clor, all of which were done in a self-destructive fever pitch during all-night sessions after day shifts at FE. I was asked to provide two reworkings of Tetuzi Akiyama’s “Don’t Forget To Boogie” LP for a proposed bonus 7” (in retrospect I’m glad this never came to fruition as, conceptually, it’s a perfect record; later I put the hour-long suite of both “Analogue” tape-machine & baoding mulch & the “Digital” Max-MSP versions up on YouTube™, embedded to your right/below) & I even ended up doing two separate remixes for two separate remix projects around the prolific Japanese Harsh Noise legend Masami “Merzbow” Akita in the same month!

The remixes started getting farther & farther away from any sort of linear sensibility as the requests came from farther afield; one of my favorites was working with Japanese group No. 9’s music (who just happened to use the same sampler & sent me all of their program data!) & there was a great project on Schematic around Charlie Morrow’s bandmate in Horizontal Vertical Band, Glen Velez, & a version (which ended up being a complete multi-track reconstruction, to the best of my ability & command of the Italian language) of Franco Battiato’s “Plancton.” I switched to using my own name for almost everything from late 2005 onwards, and as such the reworks of music by Alexander Rishaug, a realization of a later score by “Song of the Second Moon” & Instituut Voor Sonologie legend Dick “Kid Baltan” Raaijmakers, and even a complete reimaging of The New Blockaders’ “Changez Les Blockeurs” (done at request after at least one of the Rupenus brothers caught a concert at Morden Tower in Newcastle) were all carried out & issued commercially.

Due to commitments in other areas of music, I largely stayed out of the remix lane from 2006 onwards, with a few notable exceptions: Nino Pedone approached me in Berlin one year, and I ended up performing a remix of a Violetshaped piece as part of a noise gig at AS220 in Providence, which they released on a 12” in 2013 (abridged YouTube™ embed to your right/below). I posted a somewhat comprehensive selection of all of the remixes & commissioned cover/reproduction work to Bandcamp (R.I.P.) a few years back, and it’s now (October 2023) live on all of the streaming platforms as a pair of “Remixplosion” titles (along w/ the original “rkk13cd” as issued; ditto, to your right/below… check out the “Compilatrix” set of un/issued & between-the-cracks tracks from this era as well!)