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Model 500, "Starlight"
Techno godfather Juan Atkins' finest productions lie more than a decade behind him, his post-millennial output utterly unmemorable by contrast. When Timbaland and Missy Elliott appropriated wholesale and slightly repurposed Cybotron's "Clear" a few years back for the "Lose Control" single, the succeeding and lingering stench of musical necrophilia made the Detroit legend's faded glory all the more uncomfortably evident. Moderately diverse and unsurprisingly enjoyable given the contributors, this remix collection dusts off yet another Atkins oldie for another nine rounds.
Issued first in 1995 under the Model 500 moniker, "Starlight" was packaged with a Moritz von Oswald version on the flipside, making it a sought-after gem today for Basic Channel obsessives. Revived and reproduced here, it serves as the starting point for a series of mixes—most of which previously released on vinyl—that generally exploit the assets of the originals. Fortunately, this rediscovery effort was spearheaded by the Echospace Detroit imprint, one of the hottest outlets of deep techno thanks largely to the amazing in-house duo of Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell who incestuously pervade this compilation with a handful of solo and shared aliases. As DeepChord, Modell presents a characteristically spacey and lengthy mix adorned with blissed-out patches and warm pads cluttered by bits of aural detritus. Collaborating with Hitchell, he features on two Echospace versions, the first of these primed for the dancefloor. Scaling back some of Modell’s abstractions to make way for some real Detroit soul and Berlinesque dub, the previously unreleased track finds its mojo via a robust bassline and some wondrous melodies. The second Echospace mix is half as long and entirely beatless, a drifting reprise that recalls moments from The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld in a way that Kompakt’s long-running Pop Ambient series has yet to achieve. On his own, Hitchell greedily appears with three separate aliases, his Soultek mix bringing both old-school electro funk and AFX flair. Simmering with white noise and tension, his Intrusion dub version closes out the disc.
Magnanimously, Modell and Hitchell allow a few others to share in the fun of reviving a classic. Detroit native and Matrix Records founder Sean Deason garnishes his jacking mix with a little Sheffield bleep that bounces around the funky fluttering hats and crashes, while Mike Huckaby delivers some proper dub techno for the fetishists and fanatics. Convextion, a rising star in the scene who has previously recorded for Matrix and Echospace Detroit, takes an unexpected path on his turn, programming an urgent melodic mishmash draped around a schaffel beat that seems further removed from Atkins’ original than anything else here. It’s a respectful reworking like all the others here, though one obvious omission stands out: where is Atkins himself in all this? Surely he’s given his blessing to this project and pocketed some kind of fee or royalty, though I can’t think of a better opportunity for the man to remind us all of his talents than by trying his hand at a remix of his own.
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