There are many students of famed Factory Records producer Martin Hannett fiddling around with drum machines. None of them are as interesting to me as Tevo Howard. It's music that is exceptionally visual and in the current landscape of Deep House almost uniquely so. With sonorous echoes, reverb and wide spaces between layers in each track, it gives me a pleasant sense of vertigo that expatriates call the "guidebook gaze": this is a foreign land and even things that seem familiar emit a strange gleam. With these remixes of Move, Tevo and Kate Simko have made a record of unfathomable depth that's easy to get lost in.
Kate's remix starts off with soft chords that drift in lazy circles. This could be heresy, but with a blush of latin percussion and a generally laid-back vibe, you could almost call this a "summer tune" from perhaps the least likely source. There's a beatless break at 3:30 - it's very brief but calls attention to the thumping bassline, subtle but pulsing. Overall, it's just a gorgeous piece of art. Simko's Beats Mix is darker and more haunting, with a funereal organ and stuttering handclaps.
Although these are the "Kate Simko Remixes", there's also a Tevo Howard Bonus mix and it's interesting to hear what he's done with his own creation. His mix leads off with an acid crash that Armando or Mike Dearborn would be proud of. Henry Miller wrote that if you start with the drums you should end with the dynamite: here the aphorism is turned on its head as the track unwinds from the early blur of 303 patterns and becomes downright mellow. It's mental - a kind of primitive calculus. How easy it is to write "303 patterns and some complex pads", but how hard it is to carry it off...
This is the trick: to make music that is only for listening just can't be dance music. It can, at best, be dance music for people who don't dance. Tevo in particular gets this: it's an accomplishment to hit people between the eyes but you shouldn't disparage those who specialize in hitting 'em about two feet lower. And it's his supreme accomplishment that the same track can do both.
Review by: Terry Matthew / August 2011
Available: Released August 1 2011; available from Juno Download and other digital download shops.
Terry Matthew is the managing editor of 5 Magazine. You can contact him at 
