I’ve always been fascinated by the potential for a piece of music’s mood/tone to be completely altered via production, arrangement, and timing. Even when melody/harmony are kept intact, a minute change in any one of these three elements can drastically change the listener’s perspective on a composition. In some ways, this is the ultimate test for a composition’s worth. If an artist is able to dramatically alter something within the structure of a piece and have their interpretation illuminate something new about the work or ring true to the original’s intention despite radical variation, then the initial composer’s material must contain a significant degree of musical integrity.
On Plays Bee Mask, Donato Dozzy has proven that Chris Madak of Bee Mask’s “Vaporware” piece from last year’s album of the same name is full of structural richness, but also extremely permeable for radical reinterpretation. Plays Bee Mask is in essence a remix album, since he is working with Madak’s original tracks, but what Dozzy does with these materials is truly remarkable. For over 40 minutes, Dozzy manages to completely deconstruct “Vaporware” and examine each one of the track’s elements under a microscopic before moving onto the next. That means the original’s bell-like percussion gets expanded into nearly six minutes of ambient bliss and that Madak’s original vocal samples become looped swaths of glacial noise among many other things. The whole record works well as a testament to both Madak’s initial material and Dozzy’s ability to reinterpret and restructure a complete composition into something that’s entirely new yet still in line with the original’s ambient intentions.
Plays Bee Mask is out now via Spectrum Spools. You can listen to excerpts of the album below:
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• Bee Mask: http://www.bee-mask.tumblr.com
• Donato Dozzy: https://www.soundcloud.com/donato-dozzy
• Spectrum Spools: http://www.editionsmego.com/releases/spectrum-spools