'My Mood' by Robin Masters Orchestra stretches out to 12:52; the Disco Dub Stephane Deschezeaux signs on 'Just for Tonight' gets the job done in 4:01. The whole of House of Disco Vol. 9 arranges itself between those poles: on one side the long-haul cut building its house groove with orchestral patience, on the other a short tool built to slip in and out without fuss. And the contrast cuts both ways, because Robin Masters Orchestra returns as a remixer, drawing Jerry K's 'Break It Down' out to nearly nine minutes of deep house — nobody else on the record treats duration as an argument.
Tempos sit in a narrow band, but the edges define the character. At the top, Sinan Kaya's 'Dance with Me' pushes to 126 with deep-house urgency; at the bottom, Ilya Santana's remix of 'Keep on Movin'' drops to 114 and turns the indie dance cut into a laid-back stroll. Santana, a Canarian producer with a track record on Permanent Vacation, Nang and Eskimo and remixes for Human League and Lindstrom, is the most seasoned hand for that deceleration exercise. The Strike Boys meet a curious fate: all three of their appearances arrive remixed by others (Kute Juergens, Andy Bach, Santana himself), as if the group existed here purely as raw material.
The other border is tonal temperament: most of the record lives in minor keys — B-flat minor shows up on three cuts — and the few majors act as windows. The brightest belongs to Opolopo, Sweden's Peter Major, with history on Local Talk and Z Records and remixes for Gregory Porter: his take on Koala Kaladevi's 'One Another', in G major, is also the volume's only electronica detour, fluid jazz-funk where everything else stays on the floor. Eleven remixes against four originals complete the picture: a volume best understood as a conversation between remixers, where the extremes — long and short, minor and major, urgency and calm — draw its most honest map.
Sources: Inverted Audio · SoundBetter