Artist: Tim Davison
Title: Patrol
Label: Vapour Recordings
By: Carleton Neil | 26 February 2009
Tracklist:

• 1. Original Mix
• 2. Logiztik Sounds Mix
• 3. Kasey Taylor Mix

Tim Davison "Patrol"

DJ and producer Tim Davison's string of popular remixes has garnered a flurry of attention on the DJ circuit. Going back more than fifteen years into the catalog of electronic music, he's been touching up classics like The Chemical Brothers' 'Hey Boy Hey Girl' and Underworld's 'Cowgirl', tweaking things just enough to make sense for modern dance floors. As his bootleg remix of Leftfield's 'Song For Life' broke into the top ten at Juno, one can only imagine the quality of his original mixes.

Arranging a broad spectrum of house, Davison's productions are thick with sound, and many of them flexible enough to play in a variety of sets. That would explain why he's receiving accolades from everybody from Anthony Pappa to James Zabiela. For all his universalism in previous work, he's taken a decidedly more specialized route with 'Patrol', his production for Vapour Recordings.

Davison's original mix is slightly gritty and electro-tinged with a heavily bloated bassline. Its high energy from the start implies a track destined for epic breakdowns and high climaxes but Davison levels it in his style of house, bounded within stuttered female vocals and rubbery vocal edits. The bassline swells in the breakdown between cheeky fills and sustained strings, but doesn't peak as high as the roaring bassline might imply.

The remix by Logiztik Sounds elaborates on the electro-house theme, pronouncing the kick and leaving the mix a little more room to grow by introducing fills first before the bassline, which has had its EQ tweaked up a bit. Wooden fills tromp through the mix as lighter-than-air synths drift through the mix. The first breakdown brings back the rubbery edits from the original but it's been re-arranged to create movement instead of providing markers. Logiztik has extended what is revealed to be a defiant vocal in the breakdown, which plays through under a back-and-forth between thin fills and throatier ones.

Kasey Taylor's remix is percussively the most complex of the three, benchmarking the track upon extensive instrumentation and weaving in pitch changing fills and reverberating vocal repetition. Pasting it together with high synths, the bassline is muffled but also more menacing, ready to jump out of its groove. The meaty mid-range percussion is a great complement on top of the bassline, punctured by distressed cheekiness. The slightly spacious tribal arrangements are a great addition, as they create space for the massive bassline from Davison's original. Taylor seems to have realized the behemoth of a bassline he has on his hands and has put it to work carrying multiple layers of hats and fills.

An interesting twist of ideas using a traditional house structure, the flexibility in style inherent in Tim Davison's work release to release isn't immediately successful when crossing genres within a track such as his original mix of 'Patrol'. Somebody has to break ground though, and the remixes present more than make up for any shortcomings in the original mix. Besides that, hearing what he can do with tracks from 1992 makes his future work worth keeping an ear out for. 'Patrol' is out now on Vapour Recordings.