Kaito: "And That Was The Way (Echospace mixes)"

There are a lot of unnecessary and inappropriate remixes in the world, but occasionally you see two names come together that seem too perfect to possibly fail. Kaito—a.k.a. Hiroshi Watanabe—is well known as one of Kompakt’s chief exponents of neo-trance, that is, a blend of tech house made most famous by the Field for its looping and layering of individually simple elements to create an intricate melodic hypnotism reminiscent of 90s trance. Watanabe is also well known for being able to create exactly one effect: ultra-pleasantness. His productions, no matter which alias he’s working under, are so invariably, unwaveringly, exhaustingly happy that listening to one of his albums is like gorging on candy floss for sixty minutes.

Echospace, on the other hand, are a renowned dub techno act known for their excellent Coldest Season (2007) album, which generated a tremendous amount of wintry atmosphere through the minimalist deployment of monochrome elements like white noise, dub bass, and techno percussion. There could scarcely be a better-qualified candidate to tone down Kaito’s Prozac house.

The key here is that both acts are essentially texturalists, albeit with very different approaches. Kaito is a maximalist; he creates lots of warm, soft little building blocks and then just throws more and more onto a track until he’s built up a warm, soft enormous wall of interlocking synth loops. This is partly why his music is so tiring: it’s not just that every track he’s ever made is wearingly positive, it’s that every single piece of every single track is like that. Echospace, by contrast, are minimalists using very little to tweak each analogue sound to perfection. As their name suggests, they concentrate on spatial dynamics to create maximum effect.

So really, it doesn’t matter which Watanabe track is being remixed—although, taken out of context, “And That Was The Way” is one of his better efforts. Like all his tracks, it has an abundance of gently glowing synth sounds, and these remixes were always going to be about the interpolation of that incandescent loveliness into Echospace’s lithe techno efficiency anyway. Consequently, these remixes sound exactly as you would imagine—but that’s what makes them so great: Echospace dump just about every aspect of the original, from the saccharine, delay-soaked piano work to the swirling arpeggios, and rebuild using only the barest of pad touches as source material.

The two mixes actually sound surprisingly different, and neither has any real resemblance to the original. The “Shinjuku Sedative” mix, also circulating on vinyl simply as the “Echospace Dub,” is the main attraction. At thirteen minutes it’s twice the length of the original and heartbeat slow. The track is bathed in mid-range atmospherics: the familiar Echospace grainy analogue mist swirls amongst undulating deep pads from the first second to the last. Beneath it the track develops like a morphine drip; it’s over two minutes before we hear a beat and several more before the bass line develops from a single note pulse on the first and third beats into its full form. Once everything is in play, roughly about halfway through, Echospace are content to simply bask in the moment: elements occasionally leave the mix for a while, but their absence only accentuates their role in the overall track. And yet it never drags or feels aimless, instead finding that sublime zone the best drone ambient occupies where one could stay forever, bobbing like a leaf in an analogue bubble bath.

The “Transcendental State” mix is the livelier and more upbeat of the pair. An insistent hi-hat patter is introduced almost immediately, and smeared into the background is a synth pattern that would sound like trancey bleeps if only the radio signal was slightly stronger. It’s also much faster: a house-y 122 BPM compared to the “Sedative”’s 111 BPM. This version retains some of Watanabe’s pop sensibilities: it’s a potentially mixable, danceable track where the “Sedative” feels like a hallucinatory haze of medicated rapture. Simply put, Kaito fans will probably prefer “Transcendental State,” Echospace fans the “Shinjuku Sedative.”

The only catch is availability. You can get the “Sedative” mix on vinyl but the only way to get both tracks together is by purchasing Kaito’s Trust Less album, the utterly dull, full-length piano rework of Trust (2009). And you will have to buy the full thing, because every download site has the Echospace mixes as Album Only content. Which is to say: dick move, Kompakt.

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