st. beauty is keeping the remix alive

The days when the remix meant a whole re-introduction to a musical theme has passed. Remixes in the 1990s were intense re-workings, where the musical production and vocals kept the sonic skeleton, but reimagined the body (i.e. the melody, the tempo, the lyrics, vocal arrangements, musical features). Such theatrical surgery, was most famously introduced by P. Diddy, but is rarely such an event now. For most of us nowadays, the The Remix is the same song with a verse from a mainstream rapper. It’s not the reconstructive surgery or deep-tissue transformation it once was — just adding a bit of blush whether necessary or not. 

WERC Crew and Wondaland Records challenged this notion of the contemporary remix with their third installment of their Re-WERC series, featuring St. Beauty’s critically-acclaimed debut EP, “Running To The Sun”. The project, “Running To The Sun: The Re-Werc“, holds on to the soulful-psychedelic sound that St. Beauty cultivated, but makes it electric. We are still traveling to the sun, but on DMT, and we’re taking pit-stops in Afrobeat, electronica, and in various forms of global dance. It makes for not just a quality remix project, but a project that feels totally reimagined and repurposed.

Songs like “Tide” dance on top of the new atmosphere created by the duo, but feel especially haunted and intense with complex production that feels tribal and intergalactic at once. The soulful kiss-off “Caught” turns up the fun to make a track that was originally smooth and self-reflective into a downright dance bop that feels more playful and exploratory than the original. It turns out that the remix is not dead, but it simply needed to be re-werc’d.