Subsidizing The Drum Programming You Hear Today

Max Tundra “Lights” (A.G. Cook Remix)

Within a few minutes of having the thought “I wonder if the hyperpop people know about Max Tundra?” I had an answer in the form of this remix, which comes from a mini-album of remixes and covers of Tundra’s songs that was released earlier this year. (I totally missed it despite following Tundra on social media, but it’s easy to miss these sort of things.)

Tundra’s three albums from the 00s are singular in their aesthetics – extraordinarily tuneful songs gleefully subverted by his odd glitchy programming and clever lyrics, playful in spirit but meticulous in construction. It’s easy to draw a line from these records to what A.G. Cook has been doing over the past several years, especially the early days of PC Music which really went in on pushing the sounds of modern pop production to grotesque and silly extremes. It makes a lot of sense that Cook reworked “Lights” in particular – if there’s any clear precedent to his music, a blueprint for his sound, it’s this song. The remix is only a mild update, the structure and novel conceit of it are fully intact.

The vocal part of “Lights” is sped-up and clipped, it sounds a bit like playing only the vocal of the song at double speed and losing some syllables along the way. The lyrics are dense and diaristic, Tundra veering between poetic language and quotidian detail as he describes the day jobs he worked to pay for his music making and being so deep into studio mode that the only romantic imagery that come to mind is in the beauty of the lights on his array of equipment. It’s lovely but awkward, and some of the meta tension of the song is in how vulnerable Tundra is willing to get in the lyrics, but also defensive enough to distract attention from the actual words he’s singing.

Buy it from Bandcamp.