My Disco Environment Remixes

Downwards’ rum gang of industrial misfits mutate My Disco’s ‘Environment’ album in slow, brutal and hypnotic styles ranging from Karl O’Connor’s smudged gamelan rework as Cub, to a 16 minute stunner by Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (Prurient & Low Jack). ‘Environment Remixes’ serves to tie up a 10 year loop since Karl O’Connor (Regis) first became rapt with My Disco’s 2010 single ‘Young/You’, which lead to him remixing the Aussie band’s song ‘My Decade’ in 2016, and eventually issue the reverberating clang of their ‘Environment’ LP on his Downwards label in 2019. For the remix suite, they’ve picked a gang of manacled producers to reanimate the album’s cranky mania and classic industrial spirit with suitably bruising results. The swingeing, stygian flow of Karl O’Connor’s Cub remix of ‘Equatorial Rainforest’ returns a big highlight, possibly the project’s very slowest and loaded square between the eyes of early ‘90s Coil and 23 Skidoo, while Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s 16 minute take on LP centrepiece ‘Act’ follows that humid line to a frighteningly strong scene of cicadas and crackling neon sleaze sloshed with martial kettle-drum rolls recalling Con Schnitzler’s ‘Conditions of The Gas Giant’, before slipping into the lushest ambient techno mode. Following the rush of his recent records, Sam Kerridge renders the doomy beckon of ‘Rival Colour’ more tentatively, stalked with spare drums and lugubrious bass, and Bristol’s Giant Swan follow a hunch for lurching halfstep on their reduction of ‘An Intimate Conflict’, for Oliver Ho to amp the phosphorus guitar burn of ‘1987’ as Slow White Fall with the sort of noisy conviction that also makes his new album such a zinger.