[Kontra Musik]

When I saw that Ben Klock had been commissioned to remix Jason Fine, my gut reaction was to flinch in discomfort. After all, the Berghain resident’s music isn’t really known for its sense of romance or emotion, and here he was reworking a track from of the most seductively introspective electronic music albums of recent years. It didn’t really help when Klock’s take on “Many to Many” started off with those trademark dense drums — albeit somewhat more housey and skippier — that define his Klockworks label. When the robotic looped vocal sample dropped, I actually began to wonder if Klock was taking his neo-techno functionalist shtick to new extremes or was just having a giggle at himself. But then Fine’s gorgeously warm chords flow into the arrangement, redeeming the remix and giving a new dimension to those dense drums, a human, pathos-laden touch to Klock’s robotic muscle. What could surpass this seemingly incompatible match?

Given the tone and reference points of Oni Ayhun’s releases, it made him, unlike Klock, a natural candidate to take on Fine. While Ayhun’s own material moves closer to the “intelligent” techno nuances of early to mid-90s Warp than Fine’s U.S.-focused production, the sentiments driving their work are similar. Listening to Ayhun’s take on “Control Voltage,” this is readily apparent. Indeed, it could be argued that his remix favors an even more back to basics approach. Over shuffling drums that aren’t radically dissimilar to those so effectively deployed on Kyle Hall’s new Hyperdub offering, Ayhun weaves in melodies that make equal nods to sublime Sheffield electronics and oriental mysticism and welds it to a lurching electronic bass line. The end result sounds like Shake and the Sublime back catalog getting reinterpreted by a whiz kid in downtown Tokyo — or wherever the enigmatic force behind the Ayhun project now resides.