[Souvenir]

Although Ruede Hagelstein’s “Emergency” initially came out as part of a Souvenir artist sampler, packed in with his track “Friday” and two cuts from Re.You on the flip side, it may as well have been released as a single sided vinyl, such was its overpowering presence. It may not have charted highly on end of year lists or been in every DJ’s crates, but its ridiculously catchy lyrics and melody proved to be a fail-safe dance floor win. Repackaging the track via a remix release, then, is a smart move from the Schwarz brothers and their Souvenir label, with the original being drastically cut down to a radio length edit and also re-imagined by both Super Flu and Re.You.

Super Flu do everything that they should be doing in undertaking a remix; they keep enough of the source material for it to be almost instantly recognizable but also change tack enough to provide a point of difference from the original. The only problem is that their version of “Emergency” fails to spark any real excitement outside of referencing Hagelstein’s original. The bouncy, minimal, tech-house groove with its fragments of the original track are well sculpted, but even as the vocal snatches are teased out and the tension builds, there is nothing memorable occurring to anchor the track in your brain. Re.You uses an insistent single note from the original track to act as a focal point for his remix, pushing the Border Community-style production on the one. He keeps the drums blunted and druggy, foregoing the use of the rest of the melody line he scalpeled. Instead he injects the remix with other surgical cuttings from the vocals, occasionally letting the first line of the vocal play out in full. There are some good incidental sounds in the remix but the overbearing nature of the constantly present single note culled from the original becomes tiresome before too long and ultimately renders the remix as forgettable as its companion. More appetizing than this remix package would perhaps have been a re-release of the original, which is really what you want to keep going back to when listening to this release.