2014 – Fat Freddy's Drop: Mother Mother (Cosmodelica Remix)

Released in March 2014 on vinyl on The Drop label (ref: DRP 021), Fat Freddy's drop "Mother Mother" received the Cosmodelica treatment. Let's find out more about this track's many secrets...

Introduction. – As often here on the Balearic Breakfast Blog, we aim to make you listen to Music Differently. We're trying to raise your spirit's up. And you can only rise if you're able to feel and understand why and how you feel.

You may remember we already covered two of Colleen's remixes here (Murphy's Law / Lost and Looking). And, for each of them, we found interesting things that explained a little bit what her approach to Music was. In this post, we will dig further down the line!

"The revolution was the idea that music was a whole body activity … the revolution of black music was to say to people, 'your whole being is engaged, your body is your brain, your brain isn't just up here, it's all over you, and when you make something it engages all of that'… Art is style, art is about style. In the past people used to think art is about content…a communication channel of some kind. Well, I don't think art has ever been about that really, but it very conspicuously isn't now. The other way of thinking about art is not that it’s a channel for communicating something but that it'sit's a trigger, it's a way of making something happen. You can see this very clearly in dance music… what happens is you hear this piece of Music and you have to move. So it's made you do something. And my interest in art is much more on that side of things - of saying: 'What can I make happen? What can I make that will trigger something in you?' What is it that makes people do something? I think it's stylistic. I think everything that moves you in art is a stylistic issue of some kind… What interests me is: what can you make happen to people emotionally? How do you make things happen to people emotionally?" (Brian Eno, Mono Kultur #34, 2013. – On the same subject, see Marcia Carr's interview here).

Who's Behind Fat Freddy's Drop. – New Zealand's seven-piece band from Wellington, whose musical style has been characterised as any combination of dub, reggae, soul, jazz, rhythm and blues, and even techno, Fat Freddy's Drop (founded in 1999) consists of Dallas Tamaira (vocals, guitar), Toby Laing (trumpet), Scott Towers (saxophone), Iain Gordon (keyboards), Chris Faiumu (percussion, production), Joe Lindsay (trombone, tuba) and, as of 2021, Ned Ngatae (guitar), not forgetting Mark Williams (raps, onstage). Together (head over to Wikipedia to see the band members' changes, only 2 since their initial formation!), they have released 7 studio albums and 2 live albums.

About the original song. – Like the 8 other tracks of the Blackbird album, issued on June 21st 2013, on The Drop label, "Mother Mother" was recorded at the band's studio, Bays, and Fiercely represents the band's musical style, with a great deal of Panache: "The song structures are open and unruly – just like our live shows – whilst we've pushed ourselves to deliver rich and deeply layered arrangements that showcase Joe Dukie's exceptional voice. We feel totally at home melding together this unholy mix of disco, rootsy dub, blues, soul and electronic funk - it's what we do" (Press release, Contactmusic.com).

Though the lyrics aren't the easiest ones to give themselves to interpretation, one may feel the song is a reflection upon the reality of being a Mother and upon the effects such a reality brings into someone's life. Which form that "Mother" takes in the song is obviously left to interpretation... Still, the solidly positive rhythm of the song leaves few doubts... As always, let's listen to the song !

With a relatively slow start that allows the listener to enter a new musical world, "Mother, Mother" is not your typical easy piece of Music. It's a nearly 9 min evolving piece of musical art, combining many different styles (blues, techno, tribal, samba, and dance, for instance) in one solid rhythmic trip. Though it seems pretty laid-back at first, the combined tonality and rhythm, beautifully enhanced by the song's structure, make it even more compelling.

The song seems to have three different parts, and, to me, it's really the last one (from 04:27 on) that must have triggered Colleen's attention since it shares a close sonic and rhythmic structure with the one drawn by our beloved DJ. This track is a somewhat dark evolving piece of Music (another aspect we will come back to later on) that allows the listener to drift away.

Soundwise, it's a large, profound, delicate and textured song, with small sonic elements being quite realistic, the whole mix offering an incredibly deep and layered cosmic experience, nothing that can't justify Collen's interest when choosing the track for a remix!

Colleen's Remix. – In an interview with Le Visiteur, Colleen gave some insight about how she worked on this new Mother Mother's mix: "Fat Freddy’s Drop are friends of mine and asked me to remix something from their then new album. When I heard ‘Mother Mother’ I had an immediate idea and booked my friend Andy and his studio. I can’t remember who played what as we both played things in there. But aside from engineering, he was part of the creative experience, so I thought it was right to credit him. He’s a great person to work with and very talented." Let's have a listen to her version of the song :

Obviously, the rhythm is much more sustained in Colleen's version, which seems to be only logical since her and Andy's approach was a dancefloor-driven one. Still, there are a few more things one might take into consideration when listening to the track, among which :

1. Bass has a more predominant place than in the original song, but it does not "kill" the spaciness of the whole experience since we can clearly hear all of the other elements of the mix even if they're placed differently across the soundstage (great readability of the sonics, the sound is very musical with the horns being the only instruments that can be "seen") ;

2. If you listen closely, and I think there's something in there..., I feel you could hear the different sounds having their own "space", to me, each effect, each sound used here have a different "depth" thus enhancing the whole spaciness of the mix ;

3. Rhythmically, there are a few passages where Collen and Andy Yamwho? have "underlined" the sounds, its a crafted mix... ;

4. Colleen's mix offers a different "mental" picture than the original song does, it really allows the listener to picture a cosmos (and the bouncing planets in it (laughs!));

5. Collen's take is slightly less dramatic because the original variation found in Fat Freddy's drop hasn't been kept, making the whole experience more straightforward.

Without making too much about it, and thus sounding unnecessarily wordy, this mix really showcases Colleen's style we previously evoked on this blog.

In a recent interview with The Vinyl Factory's Annabel Ross, coming back to one album that inspired her production Style, Colleen explained how Mr Fingers Introduction’s production style is reminiscent of the work of her friend François Kevorkian. Each sound is really considered, she says, and “rounded and smooth and beautiful. There’s no real distortion. It’s all mixed well in relation to one another, and none of the frequencies are fighting. So they’re filling out this whole spectrum, this frequency spectrum from the bass, which is beautiful and polished and round and bouncy, all the way up to these really tingly highs. Everything is filled out and everything has its place, its own little sonic area, and it’s working together. Then there are counterpoint melodies and really cute little memorable riffs and hooks and keyboard lines.”

PS: If you own the original vinyl of Colleen's remix, you might have noticed that there is an inversion and that Colleen's track is on the wrong side (the black one with the uniform pattern groove vs the white one) so be careful when playing the record during your parties :-)