quoted 2 lines Is Panthalassa (Bill Laswell getting> Is Panthalassa (Bill Laswell getting
> jiggy with Miles Davis) any good?
Yep, and almost as good as the originals -- sometimes better, considering he
distills all the best bits of In a Silent Way/On the Corner/Get Up with It
into one disc. I'd still definitely get In a Silent Way and On the Corner,
but Panthalassa is very nice too... Definitely avoid the remixes though.
Here's the All Music Guide review:
Is it a form of creative blasphemy to alter not only the sequence but the
sound of masterworks past? In music, though, the ends quite often justify
the means, and grandmaster-mixer Bill Laswell did an undeniably haunting job
of reconstructing swatches of Miles Davis' amazing electric music for acid
jazz-mutated ears in 1998. Of course, Laswell could claim some license to do
so, for the original tracks themselves were subjected to creative editing by
Teo Macero. Divided roughly into four sections, Panthalassa is a dark,
continuous, hour-long, chronological tone poem of remixed electric Davis,
from a 15-minute capsule of In a Silent Way through 16 minutes from the On
the Corner sessions and finally nearly half an hour of selections from Get
Up With It. Offered access to the original multi-track tapes, Laswell
sometimes deletes the rhythm sections, brings up hidden instruments, adds
Indian and electronic drones from elsewhere on the tapes, constructs moody
transitions, and most tantalizingly, unearths passages from the sessions
that were being released for the first time. Indeed, the On the Corner
section yields two new titles to the Davis discography, the highly colored
rock/funk "What If" and a sinister march-like "Agharta Prelude Dub." In the
end, despite the altered sonic landscape, Laswell accurately evokes in turns
the lonely, exquisitely gleaming, nightmarish, despairing moods that Davis
was exploring prior to his 1975 retirement, a still much-misunderstood
period whose music is far too disturbing and probing to deserve the sellout
label. Richard S. Ginell
And the remixes:
Panthalassa: The Remixes is the logical extension of the previous year's
Panthalassa project, in which long-time aficionado Bill Laswell restructured
several Miles Davis recordings in similar fashion to the original production
techniques pioneered by Teo Macero on Miles albums In a Silent Way, On the
Corner and Get Up with It. Here, several dance producers are brought into
the fold, not just to rearrange the material but remix it as well. The
versions that work the best are done by producers unafraid to tamper with
the tapes: hence, two separate reworkings of "Rated X" (from Get Up with It)
result in darkside drum'n'bass burners by Doc Scott and Jamie Myerson that
find the hyperkinetic energy in the original. The highlight of the entire
project is an inexplicably vinyl-only bonus track by DJ Krush, who turns
"Black Satin/On the Corner" into a minimalist beat odyssey with several
different passages and effective scratching in all the right places. The
only real disappointment on Panthalassa: The Remixes finds trip-hop
deconstructionist DJ Cam creating an uneasy alliance by crudely inserting a
loping breakbeat onto Miles' winsome solo from "In a Silent Way." Remix
albums are often a mistake for both parties involved, but this one does work
on several levels. John Bush
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