Dance Remixes Essentials

Dance Remixes Essentials

Dance remixes are almost as old as modern dance music itself. They were born with ’70s disco, as producers like Tom Moulton, Walter Gibbons, and Larry Levan supplemented multitrack magic with techniques borrowed from Jamaican dub—echo, panning, delay, phasing—in order to stretch three-minute songs into dance-floor epics. Since then, dance remixes have proven one of popular music’s most productive forms of cross-pollination, decade after decade. In the ’90s, remixers like Andrew Weatherall and Pet Shop Boys wrung throbbing club classics out of psychedelic rock and sneering Britpop, while Todd Terry and Armand van Helden made unexpected floor-fillers out of acoustic art-pop. In the ’00s, remixes sparked a chain reaction of rock/rave fusions, and the anything-goes spirit of mashups mimicked the nonlinear logic of the internet. Since then, savvy remixes have bridged chart pop and EDM, lent indie cred to major stars, and offered playgrounds for producers to try out new styles and invent new subgenres.

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