MUSIC 05/03/12

Kate Wax – Dust Collision (remixes)

The Dust Collision of Swiss voodoo priestess Kate Wax’s recently unveiled album takes its titular inspiration from Switzerland’s world-leading Large Hadron Collider, where sub-atomic particles are accelerated into one another, and the subsequent fallout observed for our universal scientific advancement. The first single to be lifted from said album – title track Dust Collision – is a cornerstone of self-producing autocrat Kate Wax’s personal album philosophy, where humans find new lovers through passing encounters in the night, like particles colliding in the LHC – momentary, exhilarating, predatory, intimate and ecstatic.

And it is of course entirely fitting that this shiver-inducing anthem to the nightlife experience – a heady concoction of soaring vocals, driving bassline and epic strings – should be subjected to the club-friendly remix treatment upon its single release: Ghostly International‘s vintage synthesizer guru Solvent turns in an acidic slice of electro-pop that is just sweet enough to expose a tantalising glimmer of Kate Wax’s latent pop potential, but at the same time just sharp enough to spark the obligatory heads-down acid freakout on the dancefloor, whilst Border Community’s recent Italian recruits Margot take things in an altogether groovier direction with their decidedly on-message take on modern house music, building from a functional blend of rotund bassline, twisted vocals and fidgety blips to quite the melancholy emotional peak. The final slot on the vinyl B-side is reserved for an acapella vocal bounce for the creative DJ’s turntablist pleasure, running us through the full gamut of Kate Wax’s playful vocal dexterity to take in looping spoken word performance art, cold wave robotic vocal synthesis, ecstatic other-worldly soaring disco diva, staccato panting and dead-eyed drone-mantra.

The vinyl and digital formats (MP3, FLAC and WAV) will be available from 5th March in all of your favourite stores, from Boomkat, Juno, Rough Trade, Bleep, Zero Inch and Amazon to our own snuggly in-house mp3 boutique. But before all of that, head on over to Vimeo or Youtube right away for another glimpse into Kate Wax’s dusty musical universe, her face emerging out of the cosmic soup of the hand-made music video that accompanies her ‘Dust Collision’ original to languidly intone: “We are dust, we are lovers, the night loves, heroes like us…”.