Corrugated Tunnel & Antoinette: The Rejection
Process Recordings

The final single taken from Minor Obsessions, the 2010 album Dublin-based DJ and producer Edwin James Cummins issued under his Corrugated Tunnel alias, is The Rejection, which again features Antoinette Dunleavy (her vocalizing also appears on the 2010 EP Remedy For My Soul). The latest release supplements the original with remix treatments by Legowelt (Danny Wolfers, based in The Hague in the Netherlands) and Fish Go Deep (Greg Dowling and Shane Johnson) plus two instrumental versions as bonuses.

In the original version, Cummins rolls out a Latin-tinged bounce to get things moving before resetting the groove as a bleepy house bounce as a base for a soulful vocal from Antoinette whose hard-edged surface gives her voice an almost androgynous quality, as strange as that might sound. One of the song's standout qualities—aside from its syncopated bass thrust and affectingly melancholic tone—is the vocal arrangement, which finds her desperate voice multiplied into both a mini-choir and a multi-voiced counterpoint.

In a psychotropic treatment that's equal parts Italo disco, Detroit techno, and Chicago house, Legowelt recasts the tune in a frenzied “Casio RZ1 Old School” remix as a throbbing banger powered by swollen synth pulsations and jacking machine rhythms. Under the Fish Go Deep name, Greg Dowling and Shane Johnson deepen the rave vibe in their swinging “Sir Henry's '92” remix and anchor the tune's beefed-up vocal harmonies with a massive house stomp that turns Cummins' original into a dizzying anthem (for those with an appetite for instrumental versions, the EP includes two, one of the original and the other a dub version of the Fish Go Deep remix that largely though not entirely strips away Antoinette's vocals). With all due respect to the song's creator, the remixes, both of them club-ready in the fullest sense, in this case trump Cummins' original for bringing such irresistible thunder to the track.

August 2011