Scott Solter Remixes The Caribbean - EP Available Now

April 2, 2009 - PRLog -- Perth, Australia; District of Columbia, USA. The Australian music label Hidden Shoal Recordings today announced the release of Scott Solter Re-Populates The Caribbean, a new EP of tracks by American folk-pop deconstructionists The Caribbean remixed by Scott Solter.

Scott Solter Re-Populates The Caribbean is a five-track EP of dizzying curve balls that split the difference between glistening songcraft and complete re-construction. The EP lurches into life with the ominous crunching vacuum of ‘Color Television’, like an urban landscape passing by hypnotically on widescreen. Solter’s chop-shop version of ‘Do You Believe In Dinosaurs?’, released as a single, is at once stripped down and muscular – as if emanating from a slice and dice ghettoblaster. The vocals from the original are all but gone, the rhythm section made guttural and immediate, and the modulating synths have been harassed and brought to the fore. Through his inimitable approach, Solter has managed to amplify and distill the original.

With ‘That Anxious Age,’ Solter splinters the slow spook of the original song’s coda and feeds it amphetamines as if Aphex Twin was in charge of a robot nursery.  ‘Please Mister,’ possibly the most straight-ahead pop song on Populations, is the most abstract track on the remix EP, completely deconstructing the lilting melody of the original then exhuming its remains through a shortwave radio. And ‘Populations’ rounds out this unique EP in suitably woozy shimmer, like sunlight cutting through a hangover, dissolving the song’s remnants in a pool on the sidewalk.

“You’re forced to occupy their barren pop architecture.... You don’t understand it, but, though you might not admit it, you do hope it will understand you. Or at least not destroy you...” – Pitchfork

The Caribbean is known for assembling songs and records via email and snail-mail, and although that creative model has been abandoned now the band members live in close proximity, the mind-set is locked in. It’s part of the group DNA. The idea of sending five tracks from The Caribbean’s 2007 Hometapes record Populations to Scott Solter to deconstruct, warp, and otherwise obliterate, was neither intimidating nor foreign. While Solter was busy toiling with 2” tape, textiles, liquid polymers, and computers in his North Carolina sound lab, the group became familiar with Hidden Shoal and it became clear to both group and label that the Caribbean/Solter EP was, conceptually, just the kind of project that might be perfect for Hidden Shoal to release. Once group and label began receiving rushes of Solter’s work, it became obvious that such a Caribbean-Hidden Shoal partnership would make creative sense.

Scott Solter Re-Populates The Caribbean is now available in mp3 format from the Hidden Shoal Store and all good third-party digital music stores, and in CD format distributed through n5Mailorder.

Hidden Shoal Recordings is an Australia-based independent music label that has earned a reputation for releasing exciting and engaging new independent music that is not bound by genre or style. Hidden Shoal Recordings was recently chosen as one of the top 10 favourite labels of 2007 by Textura magazine and has been dubbed “This generation’s 4AD” by prominent New York radio host DJ Mojo.

Label Site: http://music.hiddenshoal.com
The Caribbean: http://www.thecaribbeanisaband.com/

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Hidden Shoal Recordings is an Australia-based music label that has earned a reputation for releasing engaging new music that is not bound by genre or style. The label has been dubbed “This generation’s 4AD” by prominent New York radio host DJ Mojo.