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Scorn, "Ellipsis"
This 1995 album is one of those extraordinarily rare instances in which a remix album was actually a great idea. For one, it focuses almost entirely on material from Evanescence, an album that many (myself included) consider to be Scorn's peak, capturing Mick Harris during that all-too-brief nexus in which his more visceral impulses and his love of disquieting ambiance were in perfect balance. Then, of course, he managed to assemble several of the most compelling and uncompromising denizens of electronic music's shadowy fringes (Coil, Autechre, etc.) to warp it all to their liking.
Ellipsis opens, appropriately enough, with the monster lead track ("Silver Rain Fell") from Evanescence, now remixed by Meat Beat Manifesto.I find it to be a somewhat amusing remix attempt, as the primary difference is that Jack Dangers just removed all of Nick Bullen's pointless vocals.He also made some subtly funky and unobtrusive additions and dispelled a little bit of Harris's harshness, but it is basically the same song, only edited to remove anything that Dangers didn’t think was quite working ("Here you go, mate- I fixed your song.You're welcome.").The awesome shuffling beat from the original, thankfully, stayed intact.
Most of the other contributors make much more conspicuous changes, however.Robin Rimbaud, for example, essentially obliterates every recognizable feature from "Night Tide" and transforms it into an ominously ambient Scanner piece (enhanced byalternately amusing and tense snatches of ill-gotten cell phone conversations, predictably).Autechre, quite similarly, absolutely gut "Falling," leaving only a very minimal lurching early-Autechre-style beat and some spectral, echoing snatches of Mick Harris’s original ethnic percussion.
Coil, for their part, rather unexpectedly contribute the most sympathetic and well thought-out work on the album with their re-envisioning of "Dreamspace."I suppose I am a pretty big Coil fan, but they were never a group that I considered particularly restrained or reverent.Like Dangers before them, they wisely discarded Bullen’s vocals and kept just about everything else.They then went one step further though, and slathered the track with some inspired and well-placed mindfuckery.Aside from a very conspicuous, submerged, and psychotropic repeating note motif, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint exactly what Sleazy and Balance did, but quite clear that the song has been vastly improved somehow- it’s just more squelchy, more shivery, and more weird.Notably, Coil also did a (lesser) second version of the same song that was only included on the original vinyl version, but it has since resurfaced on Anamnesis.
The rest of the album takes a bit of a downturn, but is still generally enjoyable:P.C.M. enlivens "The End" with some frantic (but now dated) drum-and-bass rhythms, Mick Harris perplexingly reworks "Exodus" and "Light Trap" to make them slightly less cool than the original versions, and Germ takes one of the least impressive tracks from Evanescence ("Automata") and turns it into a different unimpressive track.Then, regrettably, there is Bill Laswell, whom I just don’t understand at all.Unlike everyone else, he picked a song from an earlier album ("Night Ash Black" from Colossus).Also unlike everyone else, he made his song dramatically worse than the original by doubling the length, playing up the guitars and the vocals, adding some didgeridoo, and tossing in some wildly overdramatic movie samples.I'd like to believe that he was just being hilariously contrarian, but I have some very serious doubts.  
Aside from Coil, no one on Ellipsis quite manages to eclipse the source material, but it is certainly fascinating to hear everyone take a crack at it anyway.Part of the reason is that Nick Bullen's heavy, muscular bass lines were one of the best things about Evanescence (and Scorn in general) and many of the remixers neutered the songs a bit by removing or downplaying them.The other problem is that, with few exceptions, most of the remixes fall victim to Scorn’s own Achilles' Heel of stretching great ideas too thin and going on a bit too long.  Ellipsis is not quite a classic in its own right, but it has some great moments and serves as an excellent companion piece to the more essential Evanescence (with which it has now been conveniently reissued).
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