Search - Deep Forest :: Madazulu

Deep Forest

John R. Hodgkinson | 06/18/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Wonderfully crafted single is a great buy for anyone new to Deep Forest. Highly suggested."

Echoes of ancient (10 years old at least) cultures

John R. Hodgkinson | 02/07/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Well, we're in the sunset years of Deep Forest, those audacious synth sensitivos who burst on the scene so long ago, with the killer insight that samples of endangered cultures might raise the endangering culture's consciousness (plus let it shake its collective booty a bit). And so the Deep Forest discography gradually accumulated: albums, singles, guest tracks like those on World Christmas and Strange Days. But the weather in the places they visited got more temperate, the cultures got less endangered, and hedonism slowly replaced activism. Still, it's nice that they took one of the harsher tracks from Comparsa to stretch out in.

The BBE Harmonic Club Mix doesn't do much besides stretch out, that is, take the basic source material and spin it longer. This is not an entirely bad thing, however, given the original's "radio-friendly" (i.e. trance-hostile) length. More divergent are Pablo Flores' Deep Tribal Mix, laced with vocoder bass, and Phil Cat's frenetic Cintura Mix, using vocal samples as a sort of hyper-soloing guitar. This is the technique of "Hunting" from the first album and "Forest Power" from the third, but increasingly jettisoned in favor of new-agey tone pastels (new age is well known as the arch-enemy of cultural diversity - what could they have been thinking?)

In short - put the single on in the background, squint with your ears, and you can pretend you're hearing some lost tracks from their earlier, finer stuff."