Phillipe Roberts
Some remixes take special care in disassembling a recording. Zeroing in on minute melodic inflections that even the original artist may not have heard, they surgically remove the vestigial waste and leave you with only the purest of grooves, a Platonic ideal of bodily manipulation. Some remixes display a kind of reverence, a deliberate hesitation in scraping the sacred whole for parts. Some remixes prefer a scalpel.
In Flagranti, on their remix of Le Couleur’s “Underage,” prefer a bulldozer. The laid-back, tropical lilt of the original is sacrificed entirely—its sophisticated exterior shattered, the duo up the tempo and double down on the beat to create a high-powered, intensely explosive release of the densely packed pop energy at its core. It’s hack and slash from the minute the track starts, all sharp edges, with stroboscopic bass arpeggiations fluttering about and those glimmering synths crashing like thick waves of neon across an expanded landscape. In Flagranti do tremendous work playing with dimension; the refurbished song breathes easier even as it constricts around a more jagged pulse.
By the time a vocal sample from the chorus begins to infiltrate the mix, you’ve lost track of time and place, marooned somewhere out on the dancefloor. But In Flagranti know how to reel in a listener with confidence, dangling out all sorts of sonic bait in the form of sensor sweep reverse hi-hats that bend around each other in a feedback loop, and sampled French vocals detuned into a long, slow drip of unintelligible encouragement. Carved up to within an inch of its life, “Underage” is a snapshot of controlled chaos.