Mark Bowen with Idles playing Brooklyn Steel on May 10th, 2019 (Paul Bachmann / Live4ever)
It’s often guitarist Mark Bowen who’ll be found adding the dirtier edges to Idles‘ sound, and he’s done exactly the same for LIFE on a remix of the band’s recent standalone single Switching On.
“I have watched LIFE play live well over 100 times and one thing that I really wanted to maintain through the remix is how incredibly tight they are as a band, so I left everything from the original in there,” Bowen remarks.
““There was something new they were bringing with the song, there’s that assured LIFE sound central but there are experiments in electronics and noise coming closer to the surface. I wanted to push those ideas further, exaggerate them to the point of becoming violent. I often think a remix should eschew the original vocal, all my favourite remixes are unrecognisable as songs, that felt inappropriate here. Mez stays front and centre where he belongs.”
For LIFE, this cut – which Mez Green describes as ‘an experimental love-song’ – is their immediate follow-up to one of Live4ever’s top albums of last year, A Picture Of Good Health.
