First off: No, there's nothing wrong with your CD, nor is your player broken - it's supposed to sound like that. Now, before you send the men in white coats to put me back into my straitjacket, give me a chance to explain myself.

Many of the half-pint demigod remixes can be traced back to an initial concept that I had in mind for the track, prior to starting work on the production. The origin for the "Glitch mix" was twofold: in a purely musical sense, I wanted to cut the tempo in half, and replace the frantic 16th-note groove of the original with a loping, half-time feel. In a broader conceptual sense, I wanted to play off of, and expand, the gnawing sense of paranoia and dread so prevalent in the verses. Both in terms of the lyrics and the vocal delivery, "No More Evil" is fraught with tension, and the "Glitch" mix ended up as a bid to isolate those aspects of the original song and amp them up several orders.

To me, there's an almost Orwellian air of oppressiveness to the "Glitch" mix; the two-part verse vocal harmonies sound particularly dissonant removed from their backing instrumentation, and the "answer" vocal part, slowed down to half of its original speed, comes across like some poor soul being crushed under a dogmatic heel. There are several different drum loops on this remix - all of them digital mutations of Chris G's original performances, of course - but the "main" drum parts that underscore the body of the track come across to me like a cross between a punching bag and a gasp for air.

All of this, to me, underscores one of the single most exciting (and creatively "valid") reasons for doing a remix of a track: not to turn it into a straight-ahead dance-floor workout, and not to make it palatable for a different demographic target market or musical sub genre... but to reinterpret, explore, and expand on ideas (both musical and conceptual) already present in the original track.

You're probably wondering something at this point: "All good and fine, Mr. LaFosse, but what on Earth does any of this has to do with imitating a skipping CD player?!"

In the most basic sense, the assaultively glitchy sounds in the remix simply "work" for me: setting aside any chin-stroking pseudo-analytical hoo-hah, they feel of a piece with the body of the remix, and of the vibe of the track. More specifically, I wanted to amp up the tension at the end of the third verse; by that point, the track had already gone through at least one key change (depending on how you hear it) from the first two second verse, with an increasing amount of dissonance, as well as a steady and inexorable increase in the sheer density of sound. So the "Max Headroom" bits are - to invoke a classical reference - the digital equivalent of turning the proverbial amplifier up to "11," and upping the tension of the track even further.

But it's crucial to point out that it's not just sonic shock value for its own sake: to me, hearing Yogi's voice singing the title of the song, fractured and fragmented into countless digital shards, is very thematically consistent with the notions of intellectual/philosophical censorship that are depicted in the lyrics. The guy's trying to say something, and he can't get it out without a thousand ugly scratches (both literal and figurative) obliterating the face of the proverbial CD and destroying the meaning within.

Setting aside the intellectual pretention and focusing on the music for a moment: as one of the earliest Yogi remixes I produced, the sounds for the "Glitch" mix are (relatively) unadulterated. Parts were chopped up and stitched into unusual shapes, but the basic sonic identities of a lot of the elements are quite faithful to their original performances. The eerie bass harmonics that show up between the first and second verses are pretty much a couple of Bryan's parts from the original "No More Evil" chorus, copied and stitched together. (It's a trip to compare that part here to its appearance in the "Cold Morning" mix, and hear how utterly different the musical impact of the same basic idea is when framed by a different arrangement.) The lower, secondary bass part underneath was constructed using parts from the "Truth" bass line, and in one of this project's many serendipitous moments, the eighth-note groove from "Truth" ended up working exactly as eighth-note triplets against the tempo of "No More Evil." The vicious distorted bass line that enters in the third verse, conversely, is spliced together from a few bits of the chorus of "What Have We Here," and if memory serves, it (like the bass line from "Truth") ended up fitting into different complementary keys, relative to the original key of "No More Evil," with little (if any) adjustment of their pitch on my part.

Four and a half years after making the track, "No More Evil (Glitch mix)" still sounds good to me, and embodies a lot of what I wanted to accomplish with the Yogi remixes in the first place. If you can get with the program, I'm very grateful; if not, there's a "skip" button on your CD player with my name on it and a much friendlier track 2 on the other side.

Andre LaFosse
25 November 2005