Thursday 21 March 2013

xzique - outside looking in (down)

hidden behind the name xzique is one of many projects of antonia lucas, davin snell & kevin swain and their collective history goes back to the mid 90's. i actually thought of doing a short summary of their artist history respectivly but it wouldn't be concise at all, more like essay-length. out of character for someone like me i will not do that for this time, you will have to do your discogs lurking yourself.

i remember hearing this one first on steve lawler's outing on global undergrounds mixseries nubreed where lawler played the more stripped down and less vocal sub project remix. i was quite into that and thought it was the original mix until i got my hands on the single and found out that something was off in the titling. the chances are that labels got mixed up and since this happens in dance music it's just a case of having that in mind.

the track at hand is a driving progressive house cut with tribal undertones and it really goes for that dark feel with sweeping pads and sounds. while it is a capital try and it what a lot of progressive house was trying to do in the early noughties, i don't think dark is what i would describe this track the sub project remix, does it more effectivly. there most the vibrant funky percussion and atmospheric layers are removed and lucas' vocals are reduced to just the spoken hook.

however it does also remove some of the brilliance that the original and i am saying this as someone who's played the sub project remix the most of these two. "outside looking in" has quite a few layers and i really like how they made it all work. it seems almost to busy at times but it's builds brilliantly with tension and release and lucas' vocals, both sung and spoken really work as a part of that. banging.

buy here (junodownload)

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