SINGLE PREMIERE: MXMS - GRAVEDIGGER (LENNY DEE & MALKE REMIX)

Lenny Dee & Malke transmute MXMS' "Gravedigger" into a gibbering tribal breakcore wet dream on their remix.

MXMS - GRAVEDIGGER (LENNY DEE & MALKE REMIX)

Remixes can draw out the subtle textures and hidden meanings of a track. Remixers can draw out certain sounds, stretching out words until they run like saltwater taffy, slowing down beats until they leave a vapor tracer trail. It's like putting a filter on a photo or watching a movie under the influence.

LA funeral pop duo MXMS, standing for "Me and My Shadow", exist in a parallel dimension of paradoxes and polarities. Their music's dark, yes, murky, nocturnal, melodramatic, perhaps slightly psychotic. Yet it's also romantic, emotional, relatable, and, perhaps most importantly, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. Their music hangs in a delicate equilibrium, like a Kandinsky mobil floating in mid-air, polished and poised to perfection.

For their most recent single, "Gravedigger", MXMS have been inviting different producers to reinterpret the single's obsessive ode to doomed romance. This time 'round, the production duo of Lenny Dee and Malke team up to turn "Gravedigger" into a pummeling lowdown, ominous tribal thump. Both Lenny Dee and Malke work in European-style Hardcore - 140+ BPM blast furnaces of grinding 4/4 techno fury. Put them together and the madness and violence ratched up to 11. That's not all, though. Both producers bring some of their personal tastes as well. Lenny Dee contributes his gibbering glitchy breakcore, with samples rising and falling like speed-fed bad dreams. Malke, on the other hand, contributes his iconic live drumming, sounding like Tool's Danny Carey jamming along with a deep dark underwater dub band.

If MXMS' "Gravedigger" would be a European arthouse vampire film, Lenny Dee and Malke's remake is From Dusk Til Dawn. We Are: The Guard are into it. Sometimes love makes us do some unspeakable things.

J. Simpson occupies the intersection between criticism, creativity, and academia. Based out of Portland, Or., he is the author of Forestpunk, an online journal/brand studying the traces of horror, supernatural, and the occult through music, fashion and culture. He plays in the dreamfolk band Meta-Pinnacle with his partner Lily H. Valentine, with whom he also co-founded Bitstar Productions, a visual arts collective focused on elevating Pop Culture to High Art.