M.A.N.D.Y.

“12 Great Remixes For 11 Great Artists” collects, for the very first time on CD, the finest remixes that Get Physical’s M.A.N.D.Y. have fashioned in their six-year career.
Renowned for their ecstatic, energetic DJ sets and homespun productions with Booka Shade, M.A.N.D.Y. have also won over hearts and minds with the intelligence and sense of fun they bring to remixing. The diversity and talent of those artists who’ve commissioned reworks from M.A.N.D.Y. – among them Lindstrom, Royksopp and The Knife – is testament to their in-demand talents.

“12 Great Remixes For 11 Great Artists” is a chance for those who missed some or all of M.A.N.D.Y.’s best re-versions to play catch-up, but the CD also works as a coherent start-to-finish listen, incorporating a range of styles, vocals and instrumentals, from the old (Roxy Music) to the new (Tiefschwarz, Rex The Dog et al).

M.A.N.D.Y., aka Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung, first met in Saarbrucken way back and have been friends ever since; they first started living and working together under various guises in Frankfurt, and they took up a DJing residency at the city’s Monza club in 2001. This residency has continued to the present day, and they represent Monza in Germany, Ibiza, and around the world. Their considerable DJing experience gives them a deep, intuitive understanding of what works on the dancefloor and, by extension, what works in a remix. As such, ’12 Great Remixes’ is not just satisfying musically, it is also a tremendously powerful and effective assembly of club tracks.
None of this would have been possible without the help of Booka Shade, M.A.N.D.Y.’s long-term co-producers and co-conspirators. Booka Shade, aka Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier, are the principal architects of the towering Get Physical sound, and have been the engineering brains behind some of the label’s most successful releases. M.A.N.D.Y.’s collaboration with Booka Shade culminated in 2005’s ‘Body Language’, a worldwide club hit that was voted DJ Magazine’s Ibiza Track of the Season for that year. Booka Shade bring to M.A.N.D.Y. not just their consummate studio expertise, but also a sounding-board for ideas; the kind of creative melting that can exist only between a group of close friends, based on the mutual understanding which they first developed when sharing an atelier in 1990s Frankfurt.

’12 Great Remixes’ opens with a true anthem, the M.A.N.D.Y. remix of Hans-Peter Lindstrom’s enormously successful ‘I Feel Space’. Originally released on Lindstrom’s own Feedelity imprint, this utterly individual and ethereal cosmic house track was snapped up for re-licensing by the mighty Playhouse label, and a fresh remix from the M.A.N.D.Y. boys was commissioned. The M.A.N.D.Y. remix, which emphasized the housier elements at the heart of the track, brought ‘I Feel Space’ to a whole new audience and their extended version remains a favourite with DJs and dancers today.

M.A.N.D.Y. cheekily acknowledge their debt to pop music (their remix of Galleon’s ‘So I Begin’ in 2001 was a massive commercial hit, much to the surprise of M.A.N.D.Y. themselves!) with a re-rub of Sugababes’ chart-topping ‘Round Round’. The strong vocals and solid gold melody gives Philipp and Patrick plenty to work with, and their dark re-rub is a typically mischievous delight…

Other artists to go under the M.A.N.D.Y. knife include Norwegian superstars Royksopp, who’ve called in the talents of Philipp and Patrick twice in recent years. Both instances are included here – ’49 Per Cent’, featuring the vocal talents of Get Physical artist Chelonis R. Jones, is cut up and reconfigured as a deep, spacey tech-house track, and an equally psychedelic, dancefloor-focused version of ‘Sparks’ (taken from Royksopp’s classic Melody AM album) also features. Both mixes retain the virtues of the original production, whilst adding something new and innefably…M.A.N.D.Y.

Swedish electro-poppers The Knife shot to underground stardom with their sophomore album Silent Shout, but M.A.N.D.Y. were onto their talents before the rest of the pack – their juddering, electro-inflected remix of 2005’s ‘Pass This On’, with its irresistible builds and killer bassline, sounds as gloriously wonky and dynamic as it did two years ago. Once again, Patrick and Philipp make brilliant use of familiar elements – in this case Karin Dreijer’s crazy vocal – and twist them into new shapes custom-built to wreak havoc on the dancefloor.
Elsewhere, a childhood dream comes true as M.A.N.D.Y. are set loose on the legendary Roxy Music’s ‘The Thrill of It All’, turning it into an unstoppable slice of fittingly sophisticated, stripped-back electro. Patrick and Philipp breathe new life into ‘Damage’ by their friends Tiefschwarz, retaining Tracey Thorn’s yearning vocal and setting it against a backdrop of ultra-cool, sleek minimal house. Their heavy, techno-disco version of ‘Come into My Kitchen’ by French producer extraordinaire Joakim, as well as their organic, tribal-goes-minimal update of Rocker’s Hi-Fi’s ‘Push Push’, are two other notable highlights.
With heavyweight takes on music by Seelenluft, DJ Monique, Wessling & Schrom and Freeform Five also collected on this disc, ’12 Great Remixes for 11 Great Artists’ is a tour de force of modern dancefloor production and revision, and more than lives up to its cheeky title.