I grew up in the era of remixes, bonus tracks, and 12” release formats. Generally, it was a way of getting young, impressionable, completist-minded music buyers to spend their hard-earned cash on the same track numerous times. I fell for it, and I didn’t care.
Devin James Fry takes this concept to its extreme, though not in the original money-skimming way, by releasing one already wonderfully strange slice of sonic madness and then getting his like-minded friends and musical allies in to play with the track. The result…ten remixes, reimaginings, and reworkings of that musical idea.
There is a line of thought in music: no song is ever truly finished, and any song worth its salt can be pushed and re-molded, evolved, and melded into new sonic chapters. Devin James Fry proves that this process can be almost endless by taking “Half Ball Pit Half Bloodbath” for a run across endless musical landscapes and new creative conclusions.
Based in a stark, dance-driven, post-punk, industrial synth-scape (see, even describing the starting point requires that I make up genres), he throws in versions that are full of delicious digital confusion and gnarly analog swathes of guitar, indie-alt-pop anagrams, ambient dreamscapes that explode into Mediterranean clubland anthems and jittering, claustrophobic EDM. And that isn’t even the half of it. In many of the versions found here, the overriding feeling coming through is that of anger and frustration, a stand being made for the injustice and inequity of the modern world. I know how you feel, man!
They say many hands make light work. Here, many minds make for an array of sonic excellence, madness, adventure, and experimentation simultaneously. Not only that but the urge to storm the barricades is palpable!
