Meta-Remix MP3

The British trio Red Snapper helped define the Warp Records label in the mid-1990s with a series of singles and collections, sets marked by lessons learned from U.S. hip-hop and European club music and good old guitar-oriented soul. Some called it fusion, others acid jazz. And then the Snapper called it quits. And now, almost as suddenly, they’re back — well, sorta. Lo Recordings has released two Snapper sets in 2003: a self-titled album and a subsequent remix collection, titled Redone, that features versions of material from the self-titled record reworked by an eclectic rogues gallery of studio mavens, including Depth Charge, Blue States, Pedro and Rothko. (Any talk of a full-fledged Snapper reunion requires a Day-Glo asterisk. According to the label, if the question is whether the group has truly split up, the answer is the ambiguous statement: “Well they have as far as playing live and spending months in recording studios.”) To promote the new albums, Lo had Jay Burnett, an early Def Jam Records artist and Beastie Boys colleague, combine material from Redone into a single, 12-minute extended meta-remix, the “Super Snapper Mash Up.” To recap, the track is a mash up of remixes of various work by a single artist. Truth be told, it’s less of a “mash up” than it is a montage, less a jamming juxtaposition of dissimilar sounds than a steady flow of compatible ones. The extended track is available for free as a relatively compact MP3 (here), and also as a stream (pick Windows Media or Real Audio). These links were made available in conjunction with Lo Recordings (more info at lorecordings.com).