Noise and voice Bambule, alienation, montage and remix – the London duo reports in the middle of a learning process.
Huibuh, a remix album is hitting the front of the house. Have we ever had this happen in the last ten years? The month’s best in the more current than ever category “Never Again War” came from what felt like 27 different styles and their combinations, from repurposing, updates, which occasionally included reworks or dub versions of individual tracks, but also a complete remix album ?
Or did you, dear colleagues, not hear a remix album at all in the end? The nine pieces that Taylor Skye, who forms the duo Jockstrap with black country new road violinist and background singer Georgia Ellery, releases on this album are a celebration of irritation. Surface consideration. The mix of numbers, symbols and letters in the title of the album gave rise to a lot of expectations: a collection of abstract sound collages, for example, a collection of songs that are bound to a secret code or simply a randomly thrown together opus made up of samples and quotations.
Not entirely wrong: I<3UQTINVU is a completely remixed version of her Mercury Prize-nominated debut album I LOVE YOU JENNIFER B – and an abbreviation for “I Love You Cutie, I Envy You”. For the sake of simplicity, we'll now call the object of desire a remix album, for now.
An intrepid assembly job that is not always compelling, but certainly ear-opening
For the 2022 debut, Skye had already set up a collision course in which he practiced evasive maneuvers with his partner Ellery. How could a pretty folk melody in a dirty dubstep track survive to the end without giving up its original narrative space? Actually, the album I LOVE YOU JENNIFER B, which is now being used as a sound quarry, was something like an art pop remix with confusing voices and effects, pop and house elements, in which the reference music from the past was allowed to ambitiously come together.
What makes things exciting this time: None of the new tracks refer to the original in the title; the spectrum ranges from “Sexy”, “Good Girl”, “I Touch”, “I Feel” to “Sexy 2”. “Red Eye” (featuring Ian Starr), a booming piece of noise and voice bambule, could refer to the title song “Jennifer B”, but also to the track “Debra”, it’s hard to tell exactly, even after several listens . “All Roads Lead To London” (featuring Coby Sey & Replacement) should be made up of alienated bits and pieces from several songs. Warning, these hard-hitting beats hurt your stomach.
In “I Touch” you can hear the beats and vocals from “Glasgow”, a comparatively conventional guitar pop song from the 2022 album. But it’s not all that important, at the end of 2023 we’ll be going on a busy electro-trash-gamboy trip with Jockstrap, which will work even without the original: as an intrepid, not always compelling, but consistently ear-opening assembly work, a greeting to the Glasgow Wonky -School included. Maybe we should call this album a demix after all, something like a deconstruction of a commercially available remix using normal electronics. Taylor Skye put it this way: “It was all about the sound… it’s an experiment, I’m still learning.”