Bleep

Back in April, pianist Vanessa Wagner released her [Inland] LP, a record that saw her re-rendering work by artists like Philip Glass, Moondog and Michael Nyman. Wagner’s sparse, evocative contemporary classical style leaves plenty of room for interpretation, and as such it’s no surprise that [Inland] has spawned a remix LP in the form of Inland Versions. Wagner and her InFiné imprint have assembled quite the cast for this record - Gas, Nadia Struiwigh and Vladislav Delay are but three of the contributing artists.

Given that [Inland] is such a tender album it’s no surprise to find that many of the re-workings here deal in more weightless genres. The entries from Gas and Suzanne Cianni are particularly abstract, with Wagner’s keys subsumed by foggy drones and pluming atmospherics. Marc Mélia and Vladislav Delay also largely shy away from rhythm, though the broiling synthesisers and sharp cyberpunk tones move their takes away from ambient music towards the more torrid output of someone like Oneohtrix Point Never. Even the electro aesthete Struiwigh plays it cool on her ‘Experimental Edit’ of Wagner/Glass’s ‘Number 9’ - the track’s fourth-world production draws as much from Tropic Of Cancer as it does from Drexciya.

Inland Versions saves its energy for the final act. If you’ve spent the rest of the record craving something muscular then Huema Utku’s take on ‘Struggle For Pleasure’ is an ample pay-off. Bookended by treated samples of the original, the core of the track is a pounding club deconstruction equal-parts Ziur and Katsunori Sawa.

In Inland Versions, Vanessa Wagner’s [Inland] has spawned a remix album that is as rich and varied as the source material.