Great industrial remixes

Industrial music is full of remixes. I think it may well be cluttered with more remixes than any other genre of music. I have no specific evidence of this, but it certainly feels that way. We had the remix wars (whatever happened to them?), there are remix competitions, remix compilations, and EPs stuffed full of remixes for when a band can't be bothered stuffing their single with some extra B-sides.

I feel a lot of them are also a waste of space. Many of them don't add anything interesting onto the original; very few of them are better than the original. Then there are the bands who put out their own "remixes" or "dance / club / special mix", which is just the original track with an extra 10 or 20 second loop added somewhere (not mentioning any names, cough, Front 242).

But there are of course some good ones, and a few very good ones. Here are some of my favourites.

Front Line Assembly: Neologic Spasm (Dislocated Mix by Die Krupps). Die Krupps are pretty terrible, so nobody was expecting much from this, especially not myself. FLA had cranked up the guitars on this album (Hard Wired) and the one before it, so the one thing Die Krupps could be expected to bring to the table (guitars) were already there on this album in spades. But they really hit this one out of the park. FLA should have opened this strong album with a stronger track, and this mix would have worked well. It's big, ballsy, stompy industrial music, and ticks all the right boxes. Have a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW59yOBiDnE

Front 242: Religion (Bass Under Siege mix by The Prodigy). How or why anyone talked The Prodigy, one of the biggest electronic acts in the world in 1993, into doing not one but a couple of remixes of Front 242 is a mystery. Sure Front 242 were the biggest industrial act in the world at the time, but still... anyway, Religion was a pretty bad song off a wildly inconsistent album, Up:Evil. And The Prodigy didn't blink at this challenge; they produced a total demon of a track. If the truth be told, it bears astonishingly little resemblance to the original (I think the only thing they kept was a sample of Jean Luc de Myer gasping "burn you down!" every now and then). But seeing as how weak the original was, that's a good thing. This track isn't just amazingly good for a Front 242 remix, it's even amazingly good for a Prodigy track (and in 1993 they were arguable at the very top of their game). This track really needs to be listened to in the dark on a good club sound system, but still, here it is, if you've never experienced it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktXFmQvt3yc

The Azoic: Conflict (Combichrist mix). I'm not really into the Azoic. They're just another decent but pretty uninteresting female fronted EBM band that sound like they belong on Alfa Matrix (though oddly they're not). And they put out an EP with a pretty bland song, Conflict, with a bunch of pretty bland remixes of it... and this snarling monster. This thing hits dancefloors like a tactical nuclear weapon. Like the Front 242 remix above, Combichrist used very little of the original song (the nice lyric "Keep my perspective straight, keep me away from hate", and that's about it), but it somehow inspired Andy to produce a track better than almost any track off any Combichrist album. Amazing stuff. Have a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTkIHB3BIyo

Spahn Ranch: Heretic's Fork (Belief mix by Birmingham 6). This is one of the best industrial remixes ever, if not the best. It's one of my favourite club tracks of all time, a track I can listen to a hundred times (I'm sure I've heard it more than that) and never get sick of it. Now the original is a perfectly good song; it's off Spahn Ranch's best album, The Coiled One, and is a pretty tight and catchy EBM track. But Birmingham 6 took it to a whole new level. Their trademark guitars and frantic snare drums add a perfect level of energy to the verses, they wisely left the chorus pretty well alone, and extended the track for another minute or so with some clever sampling. Just brilliant. I can't find it on Youtube; if you want to hear it, it can be found on Spahn Ranch's "Parts Assembled Solely" EP, or on Cleopatra's 1997 "Industrial Mix Machine" compilation, where I first encountered it (the fact that it also happens to have Die Krupps' remix of Neologic Spasm is gravy).  Total win.