I love hearing pitch-shifted vocals. Get the voice low or high enough and unique inflections are leveled — identity becomes ambiguous, accents become relatively indiscernible — and everyone kinda starts sounding the same. While it’s a way of deterritorializing and distancing, it also provides aesthetic continuity: listening to the very beginning of Heat Wave’s Dejected Soul — a new and exclusive mix for Tiny Mix Tapes — I’m immediately transported back to, well… yesterday, when I listened to the Eureka’d I’m Fuckin You Tonight, which features similar pitch-shifted sounds of artists past wrapped in sublime frequencies and sheer hellish miasma.
But don’t get me wrong: the sounds on Dejected Soul, Heat Wave’s fifth mix of the year, ain’t really half-remembered. It’s not like we’ve forgotten about The Zombies’ “Leave Me Be,” which here travels through quite the dimensional muck to get to the plane on which Heat Wave exists. It’s more, uh, half-dismembered? In any case, the continuity between the mixes is exciting, given that his source material on this mix is rock rather than R&B. Zoom out billions of miles away and time-warp 150 years into the future, and it’d probably all sound the same anyway, right? Pitch-shifting leads to distancing leads to continuity leads to time leads to space leads to relativism. You know what I’m saying.
Dejected Soul, mixed by TMT favorite Sean McCann, will have a limited tape run, but it’s also available for streaming below via SoundCloud (embed today!) and through Heat Rave, a new label that will take over Heat Wave releases from Deep Tapes. Check out the mix here:
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Meanwhile, Heat Wave’s “20 Years” 7-inch will be out next week on Cauldron. Subscribe to Heat Wave’s mailing list or keep refreshing for info.
Dejected Soul tracklist:
01. stop it
02. leave me
03. begin again
04. it’s my world
05. nobody knows
06. feeling
07. she stole
08. dejected soul
09. death
10. talk to yr mind
• Heat Wave/Heat Rave: http://heatrave.com
• Deep Tapes: http://deeptapes.com