There are few pleasures like hearing the song removed from a song. After **Pete Swanson** has finished with **Ashley Paul**’s “Soak the Ocean,” what is left is like the skin of a snake after the snake has gone on to shadier pastures. The original song is a mix of gestural near-microsonic composition and lightly layered vocals, more intoned than sung. It is a pleasure on its own, Paul’s tremulous voice moving amid the fragile plectrum geometries of the accompaniment. True to the snakeless-skin image, Swanson has largely excised the vocal — the inhabitant has moved on —Â and left the instrumental bed, which he has in turn made more motoric. There are hints of her voice, a syllable allowed to repeat here and there, a phrase even less robust than the ethereal original, more a vestige, a memory, of the song than a new rendering of it. The beat gains momentum as the track proceeds, memories left behind, as it moves forward into a deeper, richer, harsher, welcoming noise.
For comparison, this is the original version, from the Paul album *Line The Clouds*, which came out on REL Records in late March:
https://soundcloud.com/rel-records/ap-ltc-01-soak-the-ocean
Swanson was half of Yellow Swans (the other half having been **Gabriel Mindel Saloman**), whose *Going Places* was one of my favorite commercial albums of [2010](https://disquiet.com/2010/12/22/best-of-2010-commercial-albums/). The magazine [xlr8r.com](http://www.xlr8r.com/mp3/2013/02/soak-ocean-pete-swanson-remix) covered the remix back in February. More from Ashley Paul at [ashleypaul.net](http://ashleypaul.net/). More from Pete Swanson at [twitter.com/pete_swans](https://twitter.com/pete_swans).