Calling all Transcendental travellers, Luke Una’s É Soul Cultura have enlisted Crooked Man to remix the debut LP from Transmission Towers.
Beamed out on Luke Una‘s E Soul Cultura label, Transmission Towers first broadcast, Transmission One, has been causing a stir wherever it has been received. A debut album of music forged in a far-off dimension. Off-kilter, oddball yet deeply emotional machine soul, fused with an Afrofuturist touch courtesy of Mark Kyriacou and Eleanor Mante. Now Crooked Man reaches through the spacetime continuum to produce a set of brand-new, future-facing Transmission One remixes. Moving beyond the realms of your average remixes, Crooked Man sets forth a whole new album of transcendental, tripped-out productions that range from gravity-defying, cosmic meltdowns to brain-busting galactic dance workouts.
A long-standing figure in the universe of electronic dance music, Sheffield-born Crooked Man aka Richard Barratt released one of bleep techno’s defining records back in ’89. Landing on Warp, it came under the alias Sweet Exorcist with the late great Richard H. Kirk. Since then, Barratt has put out a slew of exceptional productions under a variety of different monikers from Crooked Man and Parrot to Earth Angel and Athletes of God. He has released on DFA, delivered countless remixes for Róisín Murphy and reimagined the likes of JIM and Joe Goddard. Every inch of that experience and expertise has been deployed on this Transmission Towers remix release.
Who better to rework an already off-kilter tour de force than the Crooked Man himself? Creating a new album’s worth of material, he utilises the synthesised yet sentimental world of Transmission Towers yet flips it into ever more escapist dimensions. Take ‘Up’, once an early electro groover now a feverish, mutant dancefloor mind bender, or ‘Mega’, that’s twisted into a vocoder-led, sci-fi trance. Elsewhere, ‘Shadow’ morphs into a swirling breakbeat trip, ‘One’ becomes a marching, late-night, synth-pop foot stomper and ‘Everything’ is contorted from a post-punk guitar trip into a cybertronic, new beat heater.
The album though is not all on a dancefloor trajectory, with tracks like ‘Roller Skater 23’ turned from an intergalactic cruiser into a dubbed-out dream state and ‘Cosmic Trigger’ leaning into a gravitational pull of space-echoed delays and sonic solar flares.
Every twist, every turn, Crooked Man plots new coordinates, yet the overarching journey is one of seamless synergy. This is music made in an alternate reality, that distorts time, warps minds, hits hard and sinks deep, leaving a lasting impression in an age of fading attention spans and throwaway content.
‘Crooked Transmissions’ releases on É Soul Cultural October 25th, 2024. Pre order here.
