Sunwarper - Music For Reimagined Landscapes

Released: June 21

With the original album released back in January of this year, June saw the release of Music for Reimagined Landscapes with mostly remixes from a plethora of artists associated with Audionautic but also one or two alternate mixes and previously un-included b-sides. With the variety of artists on the album, it's no surprise that a lot of different musical styles were touched on including house, techno, ambient, glitch, downtempo, and then just some weird stuff thrown in there as well. The album starts out with a remix of "Vistic" by Survey Channel that leans heavily on the IDM-inspired beats that backs up an interesting approach to playing the original melodies almost like its an instrument in itself. 59 Perlen comes in later with a surprisingly laid back take on "Solar Sail Expeditions,"  which turns out really neat considering his penchant for upbeat house rhythms. But the treatment of the original melody on this track is a superb piece of ear candy. 

Eonlake's remix of "A Moment, A Lifetime" is the longest remix on here and goes through so many diferent long phases, starting out with some abstract ambient-adjacent sounds but then growing into a high tempo rhythm that is kind of reminiscent of the days of heavy techno but keeps a certain lightness in everything around it. This gets followed by Kh3rtis' pseudo-psytrance reworking of Moon Meld that captures the energy of the original and accelerates it, sending it practically flying compared to the relaxed atmosphere of the original. The remix for "Monolith Memories" done by Smiling Errors caught my ear too as a fan of all things weird and deconstructed. The laid back and spacey feel of the original is here replaced with all manner of weird glitches and noises, making the original bits just barely recognizable. 

Each artist that contributed here did something really neat with what they were given, of course. But the album as a whole is particularly well-executed in terms of order. There is definitely a theme that develops in the order of the tracks that almost mirrors the original album. It starts out slower in tempo, speeds up over the next three or four songs and then slows down a bit. It repeats this to some extent but by the end, we get into all the more ambient and beatless remixes like the celestial feeling remix of "Boundless Euphoria" by Stilhed and the warm white noise inflected reduction of "Ephemeral Enigma" by Willebrant.  It's quite spectacular that so many artists were able to create an album that feels this cohesive without any real communication between them during the process.