It's ambitious recontextualization, even if it gets away from him a little: another Gartner cut, “Cognitive Dissonance”, lives up to the title with some abrupt borderline-trainwreck swings from electro to boom-bap that would work together as individual pieces. Steve Aoki's Kid Cudi/Travis Barker collab “Cudi the Kid” is saved from its flabby trance-n-bass excess with a slick minor-key pitch shift and a regrouping around a martial, mid-tempo slice of breakbeat. His take on Skrillex's omnipresent remix of Benny Benassi's “Cinema” cuts to the chase, as AraabMuzik lets that hyperventilating gatling-laser drop loop for long enough to make its overamped malfunctioning slot-machine spasm feel as simple and immediate as the “Ante Up” horns. Style trumps niche every time here, and in its efficiently compact sub-hour runtime there's plenty of opportunity to let that style run through all kind of territory. That cut revamps its tweaky electro house chords into a more spread-out melody that stalks like a 1980s slasher-flick villain over a more traditional house 4/4, then unexpectedly disintegrates into a puddle of rattling snares that make a point of proving why the best trap comes from a miles-deep hip-hop grounding. Further elements of AraabMuzik's style show up in more transformative moments, like the nearly from-scratch rebuild of Wolfgang Gartner's Omarion-featuring “Still My Baby”. And once the wobble-bass does get dropped in, it's more of a rumbling shudder than the hyperactive hiccups in the original. Which is just what AraabMuzik does at the outset, juicing it up with orchestra hits and rearranging the beat so it's more distinctly hip-hop-friendly. In its original form, it's as steadily composed and fluid as wobbly bass anthems get, a balanced split between hard bombast and billowy emotion that might sound like a maximalist Clams Casino if you stripped out all the wubs. Eden's “Sierra Leone” is a sort of mission statement. But that's the closest there is to a unifying background to The Remixes, which really does make his own choppily momentous, joyously abrasive, and widely sourced sense of rhythm the biggest common denominator. There's more of a feel of “official” business to it much of the source material comes from the Ultra Music label and skews closer to the Electric Daisy Carnival aesthetic than anything AraabMuzik's worked with to date. 1 isn't significantly different than his previous records' approaches. AraabMuzik's mutation of that dynamic into a steady, prolonged all-peaks churn is the key: who says you have to wait for the drop? In that sense, The Remixes Vol. So much of the material that AraabMuzik's been dealing with over the past few years, from arena dubstep to pop-chart trance, rides on peaks-and-valleys successions of build-ups to bombastic peaks.
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