This remix for DFA came up at a good time as I’d been doing a number of Tuff Sherm productions around this slower sort of tempo, more influenced by Krautrock, motorik or weird disco than traditional house or techno tracks.

The original single is the opening track from the album Years Not Living, released last year. Larry Gus had a really interesting approach to developing the record, which was influenced by the writer Georges Perec. As detailed in this Dummy Mag feature, he collected all of the samples and various song elements into a large library and then used an algorithmic model to match them into a huge number of combinations. The album is then comprised of what he judged to be the best combinations. All samples were key-labelled but only the drums and percussive elements were classified by tempo – he stuck to the rule of not digitally transposing any of the samples, but used Ableton to adapt the BPMs as necessary. This unusual genesis for the song meant that lurking in the stems sent through to me were all kinds of ideas that were ready to be explored as independent subjects, which made for a particularly interesting remix project.

The original has a really outstanding video by animator and graphic designer Seth Brau.