Japancakes - Soon (James Rutledge Mix) / Touched (Ricardo Tobar mix)

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4...according to our Phil on Thu 19 Jun, 2008.

Japancakes ruined one of my favourite albums last year by covering My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Here there are on a 7" on Sonic Cathedral. This time they're being remixed! Pedro remixes them destroying 'Soon' and fortunately he's made it more his own and it's actually pretty good. Certainly not a patch on the original but as far as the Japancakes version goes it's a ton better. Ricardo Tobar (handy when your car breaks down.... and I keep fighting the urge to call him Richard Tobar but that doesn't sound as rock 'n roll) handles the other mix (a version of Touched) in a reasonably straight in a shoegaze house kind of way. Not mad keen, but the James Rutledge side is worth checking out definitely.

To coincide with the ﬁrst live dates by the reformed MY BLOODY VALENTINE, Sonic Cathedral is very pleased to announce the release of our ninth single – a very special white vinyl seven-inch containing two exclusive remixes of MBV cover versions by Athens, Georgia based instrumental post-rockers JAPANCAKES.
Few albums released last year were as divisive as Japancakes’ ‘Loveless’. Their song-for-song cover of My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 masterwork provoked consternation and celebration alike on messageboards and blogs the world over; people were either up in arms that they had dared to slaughter the sacred cow of shoegaze, or bowled over by the sheer beauty of the beast. Needless to say, Sonic Cathedral fell into the latter camp, not least because Japancakes replaced Kevin Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals with cello and yearning pedal steel and we’re real suckers for a pedal steel. As a result of the instrumentation and the fact that Japancakes eschewed any reverb or distortion, the album plays like a classical symphony, with a clarity and beauty that the original, in all its otherworldy oddness, never had.
Inspired, we commissioned two remixes that would underline the enduring legacy of My Bloody Valentine while still being in keeping with the experimental background of Japancakes (who, after all, were formed in 1999 by guitarist James Berg for a show where they played a D chord for 45 minutes).
On the A-side, JAMES RUTLEDGE, fresh from the success of ‘You, Me & Everyone’, his latest album as Pedro, plus his remixes for Radiohead, Foals, MGMT and Bloc Party, elected to rework ‘SOON’. He has turned it into an insane mix of glitchy electronica, Tortoise-style post-rock and freeform jazz drumming that constantly sounds as if it’s going to fall apart and is certainly as alien as the time MBV gatecrashed Tommy Vance’s Top 40 rundown back in 1991.
“I love things that irritate purists more than anything else,” said James Holden, boss of the brilliant Border Community label, as he put forward his latest signing, Chilean electrogazer RICARDO TOBAR, to remix ‘TOUCHED’ for the AA-side. Tobar turns the only song on ‘Loveless’ written by MBV drummer Colm O’Ciosoig, originally a brief 57-second sound collage, into an atmospheric and ethereal six-and-a-half minutes of blissed-out, Balearic beats.

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