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THE FREE DESIGN
The Now Sound Redesigned
(Light in the Attic)
* * * * 4 STARS!
With modern recording technology, nearly anything is possible. Using a few mouse clicks, a producer can turn an anodyne Air Supply vocal harmony into a monstrous stoner-metal dirge. So it's not all that shocking to find some of today's craftier beatmakers and studio alchemists transmuting the Free Design's cotton-candied sunshine pop from the '60s and '70s into head-nodding fodder you could blend into an underground-hiphop DJ set.
The Now Sound Redesigned arose out of Seattle label Light in the Attic's philanthropic reissuing of the Free Design's back catalog. When you have fans in high places, like these melodious goody-goodies do, a remix album is inevitable. And this one's better than most, due both to the outstanding source material and the remixers' acute affinity for psychedelia's soft underbelly. Red-hot indie hiphop crate-digger Madlib puts ruggedly kinetic beats beneath the sweetly lilting orch-pop of "Where Do I Go," then forms a great oblong groove out of shredded analog-synth tones, violin, and triangle. Stereolab and the High Llamas conflate five or six Free Design tracks in their remix to create a psychedelic collage of hauntingly beautiful Mort Garson-like exotica. On "To a Black Boy," Danger Mouse and Murs take the most liberties, as Murs lays an original rap about a promising scholar-athlete teen imprisoned for statutory rape over DM's staccato beats and an enveloping female voice used as texture. Whether they're reverent or irreverent, the remixers unerringly find-and cleverly recontextualize-the poignant beauty of the Free Design's fluffy yet enduring songs.
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