Sinkane’s Ahmed Gallab knows a thing or two about distance. He was born in Sudan, is based in New York, and he’s toured the world with Of Montreal, Yeasayer, and Caribou. He looked even farther afield with his 2012 album for DFA, Mars, blazing a trail from retro-tinged Afrobeat to outer-limits psyche, and leading it all off with the determined cry, “Gotta keep on runnin’.”
With his latest single for DFA, Sinkane touches down in Berlin en route to the red planet. Barker & Baumecker are a pair of producers and DJs linked to Berlin’s iconic Berghain club; their 2012 album for Berghain’s Ostgut Ton label, Transsektoral, made origami out of the time-space continuum, folding classic house and garage into futurist techno. They’re the perfect remixers, in other words, to take Sinkane’s “Warm Spell” to a place you never would have expected, and boy, do they ever, spinning the original’s hothouse Afropop into a skeletal deep-house groove fleshed out with ghostly echo. Berlin is reportedly enduring its darkest winter in 43 years, and it sure sounds like it here. “Feel your blood warm up,” sings Gallab, but Barker & Baumecker’s elegant rhythms unfold like frost on a windowpane. When it’s this cold out, the only thing to do is to keep dancing.
Sinkane’s “Warm Spell (Barker & Baumecker Alt2 Remix)” is out digitally on Tuesday, March 5, backed by a second Barker & Baumecker remix of the same track, plus “Making Time (Tuff City Kids Remix),” a rework from Germany’s Philip Lauer and Running Back label-head Gerd Janson. The vinyl will follow on March 11.
Here’s Barker & Baumecker’s other “Warm Spell” remix; if you’re quick about it, you can click through to the SoundCloud page for a free download.
