Thursday, June 30, 2016

Special Feeling by Spektralized

I continue to discover more and more indie (usually European) synthpop and futurepop outfits.  Often, I discover them through remixes; i.e. some outfit remixes a song by someone I know, and then I search the remixer up to find out more of what they've done.  I had a Mental Discipline remix of a De/Vision song that was pretty interesting, so I searched Mental Discipline and found this song.  This is actually another remix, of Norwegian futurepop outfit Spektralized.  Mental Discipline is himself a single guy from Russia who rarely performs his own vocal work, so he "features" a lot of other bands and/or individuals in his work anyway, meaning that it's kind of a spectrum from remix to collaboration to the work of an individual.

Anyway, this is a great song, and it's the best version of it.  The synth line at about 3:05 (and again at the end) is my favorite part.  I was reminded of the KMFDM song "Juke Joint Jezebel" which I first heard on the Mortal Kombat.  What I didn't  realize is that I was hearing the Giorgio Morodor Metropolis Mix.  Well, I did, but I didn't really think about it.  It was many years before I heard the original, and I was surprised at how much I really missed the synthline that runs through the entire Metropolis mix; in the original mix, it's only a very small part of the song at the very end.  Morodor wisely saw that as the most interesting single element that needed to play a much larger role.

I think the same thing about the synthline at 3:05 on this mix, though—if I had the original source files, I'd try to integrate it as a subtle (but not too subtle) subtext throughout most of the entire song.