The British producer Lone has a particularly promiscuous relationship with dance music’s subgenres. He’s tried his hand at lysergic beat music with 2009’s Ecstasy & Friends, rosy Detroit-techno revivalism with 2010’s Emerald Fantasy Tracks, and opalescent boogie via last year’s “Airglow Fires” (No. 8 on SPIN’s 50 Best Dance Tracks of 2013). Now, in a remix of Illum Sphere’s “Embryonic,” he trots out the rolling rhythms of mid-’90s drum’n’bass.
The tempo may have shifted, but the signature — bright, buoyant, blissful — is all Lone. The original, on Illum Sphere‘s recent album Ghosts of Then and Now, is an ethereal fusion of R&B and Steve Reich, and the remix makes good on the song’s will-to-weightlessness with an upward spiral of chimes, harps, and crisply stepping breaks. It all sounds a little like a fusion of Heaven or Las Vegas-era Cocteau Twins and Nuyorican Soul’s “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun (4 Hero Remix),” and it’s guaranteed to put a spring in your step.
There’s no proper release planned for the remix for now, but you can enjoy it in full below.
