Peppered With Spastic Magic: A Collection of Two Lone Swordsmen Remixes

OK let’s not ignore the unfortunate title: even if it is intended to use the s-word in its original sense of jerky or random movement, not the ableist slur, it was as crass to use it in 2003 as it would be now. That aside, this is an immense collection of reworks by Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood. It’s a marker of how unjudgemental the duo were about musical categories that their source material can include fairly middle-of-the-road indie / soft rock (Starsailor, Texas), techno mainstays (Slam, Luke Slater, Alter Ego), alt-country (Calexico), hip hop / trip hop (Stereo MCs, Howie B) and on and on. The remixes, though, connect these things effortlessly: not simply by applying a house style to them, but by getting into the deep sonic essences and wiring them into the TLS mainframe.