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Mai Doi Todd & Nobody :: "Autumn (Remix)"From Revisions (Plug Research; 2006)
This remix has catastrophic effects on the following social setting: a small group of friends listening to your after-party mix. “Catastrophic” in the sense that conversation is completely, utterly derailed, and your one friend keeps asking you to play it “just one more time.” Then you and he and maybe one of your other friends say, “Hey, we should make a music video for this.” And because Mia’s unsubtle sentimentality is here bruised nicely by the fuzzy noise and nod of Nobody’s cute-hop production, the three of you of course imagine a music video where a boy and a girl, star-crossed lovers, meet for the first time just moments before the end of the world. Your imagined Romeo & Juliet slow-dance in the onset of a nuclear winter, or maybe we’re watching them be peacefully blown apart into whirlwinds of ash, swirling in a sluggish, stutter-framed white light. Whatever, this thing’s got some damaged beauty that it’s jonesin’ to soundtrack.
Then a girl you know arrives and asks what’s going on, and that one friend of yours says, “Play it one more time.” So you do, and the girl loves the song, naturally, and you and your buddies explain the music video idea, and she probably doesn’t really love that as much, but she has her own thoughts to add. Soon you and the lot are planning a reversed shot intercut with the couple dancing; this shot is a backwards burning leaf, its flaming vestiges recombining and reforming as it falls. After all, the song is called “Autumn,” and it is both dying and pretty, melancholy and warm; it’s a chilling, sappy beatitude to all things transient. For some reason it takes about twelve listens for you to realize that, at about which time another girl walks in, plops down, listens for a minute, asks you what it is, you mispronounce Mia Doi Todd’s name and stumble over mentioning it’s the Nobody remix, she nods and commands, “You should make a mixtape for me, and you should put this on it.”
So now you’ve got another bloody mix on you. See? Catastrophic.
Chet Betz :: 10 November 2006 |
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