 Travis Egedy's last Pictureplane album, Thee Physical, was a crowded concoction of garish rave signifiers, dance music clichés, and the punk-inspired free-for-all collage aesthetic of his earlier work weighted with lyrical conceits surrounding gender identity. With beefier production values that pointed more directly toward trance and euphoric house, it was undoubtedly the most complete and confident thing the Denver producer's created to date. But never a stranger to the internet, Egedy's free download series, Dimensional Rip, has played host to a handful of jumbled, messy mixes, and the seventh installment is a full-blown Thee Physical remix album.
Well, sort of: It depends on how you define "album." Only five of Thee Physical's 11 originals are given the remix treatment, and they're plopped down as an unordered clump of beats. I'm not sure how we're supposed to listen to this; on my mp3 player, they're sorted alphabetically, meaning three remixes of "Body Mod" are followed by a whopping seven reworks of lead single "Post Physical"-- it's not the most measured playlist I've ever heard. In my iTunes, however, the tracks are assorted seemingly randomly, splitting up the monotony but throwing in a whole lot of volatile randomness. So as much as we might want to call Dimensional Rip 7 an album, in practice it's merely a collection of tracks for us to peruse and choose from.
Even though the production values of Thee Physical seemed to pull Egedy away from the kind of homemade dance music made from big obvious samples (such as 2009's memorable "Goth Star"), its remix companion hands the album over to a whole spectrum of DIY denizens, from recognizable to obscure names. The results vary in quality just as much. For as many that simply aren't distinctive, there's a number of cringe-worthy facepalms. Chicago's Fire For Effect seize on the slow, belaboured theatricality of "Post Physical", turning it into something saccharine and overblown, while the less said about Craxxxmurf's headache-inducing take on "Touching Transform" the better. Dimensional Rip 7's sheer size has one advantage, however: For every misstep there's a good remix lurking behind it. Ritualz's "Alien Trance remix" of "Post Physical" takes hold of the trance thread that weaves through Egedy's work and turns it rubbery and warped, while Adeptus lay down a bed of lush synths and acid gurgles, turning "Trancegender" into the aching duet with Zola Jesus it should have been in the first place....full text |
| Pictureplane's "Thee Physical" was a conceptual work about how we, as humans, relate to our 3rd dimensional world by experiencing it physically through touch. and our experience of being human inside of physical bodies in a post-physical digital age. this collection of remixes is a continuation of these concepts, each remixer being hand selected by Pictureplane to work with the digital skeletons of each song, to carry out their own visions of what Thee Physical meant to them, and their physical forms. This remix double album, is the 7th Dimensional Rip. which is an ongoing conceptual art work by Travis Egedy (Pictureplane). Each Dimensional Rip is meant to be just that: a rip or tear within space and time. a way of putting something out into the universe that helps to alter perception and the very world that it exists in. past Dimensional Rips have been anything from group art exhibitions, a zine, a mix of slowed down happy hardcore, or a performance artwork inside of an art museum. the 7th Dimensional Rip is no different....full text |
| The first thing on Pictureplane’s 19-track tome of Thee Physical remixes, Dimension Rip 7, is 50 unadulterated seconds of Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks, courtesy of Chapel Hill’s Extreme Animals, and it’s pretty much never downhill from there. The contributors from which we’ve come to expect great production—Grimes, Unicorn Kid (whose remix has been featured here already), Becoming Real, Teams and Physical Therapy—unanimously deliver. Relative newcomers like Fire for Effect, Tearist, Ritualz and Lokiboi step up massively. I know I’m just hyperlinking, but credit is due to everyone working here. It’s big and it’s got 19 faces and it turned out really beautiful....full text |
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