Of the four "Any Raw Flesh?" tunes I selected for remixing, "What Have We Here?" was the one I had the fewest ideas about in advance. That may be why both of the versions on "half-pint demigod" are so quirky and unusual to me.

One of the central elements of "Freedom Rock" was a happy and unexpected technical accident. Logic Audio, the program I produced the remixes in, has an "audio quantize" function. The idea here is that the computer will "read" the rhythm of an audio recording, identify the timing of the musical information in it, and then perform microscopic shifts in the timing of the audio performance so that they line up with an internal rhythmic grid, thereby "correcting" or "improving" the rhythmic precision of the original performance.

If that sounds pretty far out, I agree. I should also mention two things: one, it requires some tweaking and adjustment to get right; two, sometimes the results don't exactly sound "right."

Hence the main rhythm here, in which Chris G's beautifully supple and organic drum groove is turned into a choppy, erratic beat that sounds like some kind of cross between Bjork and Autechre. The result of applying Chris' playing to the Logic audio quantizer ended up producing a result which was - to use a highly intricate and technical audio engineering term - "fubar'd." That is to say, it sounded NOTHING like Chris' original performance, and most of the drum hits in his beat had been COMPLETELY displaced and incorrectly "corrected." But I really dug the result - the unpredictable quality of the beat really appealed to me, and the unnatural feel was amped up even more after I fed this mutant track through a digital distortion filter.

Believe it or not, though, that's not the strangest thing that happened to Chris G's playing on this track. You know the funky, percolating sound at the very beginning of the remix, that runs through much of the tune? The one that sounds like a cross between a wha-wha pedal, a talk-box, and a jaw harp? That's Chris G on full drumkit (from the beginning of "Truth"), fed through a plug-in that applies tunable resonant frequencies to a sound.

Against these completely unnatural digital mutations of two different Chris G performances, most of the rest of this track is made up of guitars, and for the most part, they retain the basic "guitarish-ness" of their sound. To me, there's a really warm, organic quality to a lot of this track, even with the ultra-digitized drum elements involved, and I think a lot of that has to do with using relatively unscathed guitar parts for so much of the arrangement of the tune. That's part of what the "Freedom Rock" title refers to - this track strikes me as a post-Warp Records twist on '60s psychedelic rock. The remix name is a tip of the hat to a classic rock compilation from my childhood, which was advertised on TV to no end, and which featured two ENORMOUSLY out-of-it hippies extolling the virtues of playing the compilation at high volume. I doubt there's much crossover between regular listeners of that compilation and the audience for this remix, but I'll nonetheless reiterate the on-screen request to "turn it up, man!"

Other details: the bass line here comes from "Truth," and I do believe it's one single note, copied and pasted over and over. I get a big kick out of the idea that the totally glitchy, stuttery, tons-of-notes guitar parts that kick in after the third verse is basically a digital version of a "guitar solo." The outtro section is one of the flat-out loudest and funkiest bits on the whole record, and unlike the main body of the tune, Chris G's playing gets to be heard more or less unadorned here, in all of its natural, grooving glory. And between the "digital distortion" drums, the "electronic jaw harp" sound, and the "slow funk" groove, there's three different mutations of Chris G performances happening simultaneously during the outtro. Lots of different remixes on this album have three or more drum loops going on at the same time, but I don't think any spot on the record makes it sounds less like "lots of drums" than this one.

Lyrically, the original version of "What Have We Here?" is very intriguing to me, because the words are very abstract and ambivalent; they have a grandiose, epic quality, but also a wounded, vindictive side to them. The "Freedom Rock" remix plays off of the more majestic elements in the lyrical content; I think it's that aspect, coupled with the fact that the vocal melody is in a major key, which gives this track a warmer, more approachable, almost "friendly" quality. Given the generally dark and intense vibe of a lot of the album, and particularly the one-two punch of opening the record with "Glitch" and "Droid," this track is a nice chance to let the listener enjoy the record without laying too many sonic or conceptual challenges on them. A lot of the remixes on half-pint demigod are complex, aggressive, and sonically overwhelming, but to me, "Freedom Rock," more than anything else, is simply a lot of fun to listen to.

Andre LaFosse
5 December 2005