One of the albums of the summer has been JIM's Love Makes Magic, a ten songs that marry sunkissed acoustic guitar and piano with Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonies, a Balearic record in feel and sound. There were some dubs a while back that stretched the song Still River Flow into a new direction. Now there are a pair of Crooked Man remixes of the song Phoenix, the Crooked Goth mix and the Crooked Fire mix. Phoenix (Crooked Goth) is out now at Bandcamp (and to order on 12" vinyl), a timeshifting, warped eleven minute opus, the acoustic guitar and vocal isolated and then joined by the dull thump of a drum. The vocal gets echoed out of shape, bouncing around the mix. At two and half minutes a skippity rhythm kicks in and it all goes further into the blue, sunburnt and fried. At five minutes in there's a drop out that leads to some cavernous reverb and vocal and then a lovely, long slow rebuild. The second remix, Crooked Fire, is also almost eleven minutes long but not available until Friday.
The original album version of Phoenix is a delight, an after hours, after sun song, with guitar, strings and a lovely, FXed vocal.
Crooked Man (Richard Barrett/ Parrot) is from Sheffield, half of bleep rave outfit Sweet Exorcist and the man who produced Roisin Murphy's Roisin Machine and then remixed the entire thing into Crooked Machine back in 2021. One of the stopping off points in between those two projects was his 2018 album Crooked House, an album of house/ deep and bleep house/ bent out of shape house.
Edit: I should of course have mentioned that Phoenix is a cover of a song by The Cult, from 1985's Love album- the one with She Sells Sanctuary, one of the '80s finest full on goth- rock songs.
