If Leg Puppy are already masters at smelting dancefloor gold then how, would you imagine, can they be improved upon. But when you hand over the keys of Leg Puppy’s EDM Aston Martin to Dicepeople you can expect your ride to be pimped in midnight black and have your engine tuned so it rumbles with the synthesised-growl of an shadow-dwelling beast. Dicepeople are Zmora and Matt Brock who formed their darkwave union in 2013 and, like Leg Puppy, love putting on an intense live show. Both acts are definitely branches of the same family tree, and so letting Dicepeople remix your work is a match made in (a dark corner of) Heaven.
The EP features four remixes and kicks off with Leg Puppy’s collaboration with Josefin Öhrn from earlier this year ‘Secret Friend’. The original was a throbbing ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ for this generation and Dicepeople have dropped it into a deep cavern to surround the core vocal line with huge swirls of reverb and echo which bounce off the walls and reverberate so much that they sometimes threaten to swallow the song whole.
‘Lights Out’ originally sounded like a collab between Mark Stewart & the Mafia and Cabaret Voltaire, with crisp blips, thrumming beats and stark vocals but Dicepeople have synthesised elemental forces to create the effect of staring into the face of a storm front. They’ve pitched the key up and added Siren wails in the background of this digital storm and the phrase “lights out” drifts in and out like a warning from the afterlife. The sense of urgency has been dialled up in this version and it crescendos in a cacophony of sound which conveys the true terror of what might happen if the lights went out.
If you look at the waveform of ‘Black Tears’ in SoundCloud you can its slow incline and this is a track which builds menacingly from a bass-less simmer to a booming, super-heavy broil. Dicepeople have taken ‘Tears’ from the 2019 Leg Puppy release Non Disclosure Agreement (featuring Voi Vang on vocals) and switched the major key feel of The Cult and remixed it into a half-beat, minor key monster. It’s a teeth-grinding, caffeinated journey that has all the jagged edges of a broken mirror in haunted house.
‘Paranoid’ is a motorik banger from 2018’s You Should Be Paranoid and this remix was previously featured as the extra track on the ‘Twit Machine’ single release. It’s a synth-drum fuelled magnum-arpeggiopus which bubbles along like the overture from an unmade sci-fi film and fires bursts of vocals at you Big Brother-style. There’s a menacing lull just over halfway through which is trampled under deep bass and a reedy synth line buffeted by dark eddies.
Dicepeople have taken Leg Puppy’s shiny diamonds and transmuted them into darkest jet and this PVC-swathed set of remixes allow their darker side to undulate in an inky blackness. Although Leg Puppy may have been Sub to Dicepeople’s Dom, the trust was well placed and Leg Puppy did not have to use their safe word.
Leg Puppy Vs Dicepeople is available as a digital download on Bandcamp
Twitter: @Legpuppymusic
Review by Paul F Cook
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