- Border Community, James Holden's kinda-floor-focused-kinda-not imprint, has been sticking to its guns since 2003, keeping one foot in dance music while letting its other one tap around in experimental electronics, synthesizer meanderings and pretty much whatever other textures suit Holden's fancy. Visually represented by a comically pastoral scene, replete with windmills and rainbows, scrolling by at the bottom of its website, Border Community is a kind of utopia for sounds you can't imagine finding their day in the sun anyplace else. Every so often, though, the Community lobs a hit at us from behind the walls of their commune, and a new club-ready mix of Luke Abbott's "Brazil," first featured on his Holkham Drones album from 2010, is their latest transmission to enter our airspace.
Trance-disco? Trance-kosmische? Trance-trance? "Brazil (Slow Version)" could be any of these things, honestly, depending on your mood and the time of day. Smoothing out the original's shuffle into sure-footed 4/4, Abbott puffs out the chest of his nerdily epic chords. (The original mix, which also features here, sounds pretty withdrawn by comparison.) Whether its newfound sense of ambition and grandness of scale translates into "progressive" may be a matter of personal preference, but its big sound palate certainly feels of the moment. "Grumble" dives without fear into maximalism. It's the lesser club track, if only because it doesn't benefit from "Brazil"'s adventurous melody. Gold Panda and Etienne Jaumet turn in remixes on the flip, with the former sculpting out most of the original's bombast and the latter amplifying its krautrock tendencies.
Lista de sequência de músicas A1 Brazil (Slow Version)
A2 Grumble
A3 Brazil (Album Version)
B1 Brazil (Gold Panda Remix)
B2 Brazil (Etienne Jaumet Remix)