This weekend, on a back-to-back Radio 1 Session with Rob Da Bank, James Blake debuted a rather woozy remix of D’Angelo’s ‘Left & Right’, under his Harmonimix guise. Listen below:
Some of Blake’s best and most interesting work has come from his Harmonimix concept, where he takes songs he loves and melts them around entirely new rhythmic and harmonic frameworks, often layering his own distorted vocals above the original for good measure. It’s a trick used to great effect on his horrifyingly distended version of Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills Bills Bills’, and with stunningly emotional results on his chiptune take on Peverelist’s majestic ‘Roll With The Punches’ (still quite possibly the best few minutes of music he’s ever written – listen here). And of Blake’s originals, his best tend to incorporate features of the same approach, via clever reshaping of existing songstuff (see ‘CMYK’, which riffed on Kelis and Aaliyah).
