Pulseprogramming: Tulsa for One Second Remix Project
Aesthetics

A cryptic note accompanying Tulsa For One Second Remix Project hints that it may be Pulseprogramming's swan song—a shame, given how well the original album still holds up two years after its release. Still, the remix set softens the blow, even if it's hardly a Pulseprogramming release at all considering the degree to which the new interpretations displace the originals. In fact, the term 'remix' is an arguable misnomer in suggesting that guests have reshaped Pulseprogramming's material; the album is more a 'covers' project with most versions exhibiting a merely tangential connection to the originals. While melodic fragments and vocal wisps from the 2003 work do surface throughout, one sometimes struggles to draw direct connections between the albums. Nudge's explorative dub-funk (“Three Year Stone”) and Laub's skittish glitch-funk (“Tulsa Lebt”) certainly impress well enough, but the identity of the source material remains a mystery.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing and is, perhaps, more a positive when the collection's stylistic diversity is noted (something that, in itself, shouldn't surprise either given the contributors: besides Nudge and Laub, there's Hood, Static, Köhn, Schneider TM, Ghislain Poirier, Barbara Morgenstern, B. Fleischmann, and others). As mentioned, some pieces do echo Pulseprogramming's style. Pal:ndrom retains the group's warm electronic skip on “String Theory of Photo Fodder,” as does Static on his glistening electro-funk version of “Off To Do Showery Snapshots.” Others depart dramatically from Pulseprogramming's style. Though he 'remixes' the same song as Static, for example, Ghislain Poirier's spacey hip-hop lurch sounds nothing like it. The repeated overhauls of “Blooms Eventually” allow for fascinating comparisons: Hood trades the buoyant tech-house feel of the original for a loose indie-rock treatment, Barbara Morgenstern gives it a dramatic electro-glitch overhaul, and, in his infectious stunner, Sam Miller pairs the song's girlish vocal (“Precious little time to spend with you”) with a sweetly bumping tech-house groove. Equally contrasting are Schneider TM's electronic-folk-blues fusion (“Suck Or Run”), Sylvain Chauveau's re-casting of “Within the Orderly Life” as an elegiac classical piano concerto, and Deviationists' epic tech-house (“Salut_Tulsa”). Even though the fourteen tracks weigh in at an exhausting 78-minutes, there's little filler to be heard on this consistently rewarding collection.

December 2005