Little People has steadily built up a reputation for, as he puts it, “making downtempo electronic music, part beats, bleeps and snippets of other people’s music with real live instrumentation.” On the follow up to the original album, We Are But Hunks Of Wood, he’s truly turned the tables by enlisting a roster of talented artists to re-work the initial tracks for a second release. We also recently had the pleasure of featuring hip-hop artist Blockhead’s remix of eerie Lewis Carroll-themed track “Wonderland” as a precursor to the album itself and named it #1 in EARMILK hip-hop for the week.
It’s serendipitous for me to be the writer for the We Are But Hunks of Wood remix album, since Little People was the subject one of the first track reviews I did as a relatively inexperienced intern at Boston-based newsweekly DigBoston. In this follow-up, Little People has turned the tides on what he does best by letting artists who interest him add their own ideas to his music through collaborations, each one as intriguing as the next. His musical process, and this subsequent remix album, is a constant state of experimentation, producing many offshoots and what he refers to as “sketches” and always keeping the foundation of instrumental beat tapes in mind for the off-cut tracks included.
Below, he explains some of the inspirations and overall mechanics behind these latest re-worked efforts:
“Ever since my second album came out, I was keen to get a few remixes of some of the tracks, but the way that it eventually came together was fairly organic, happening over a period of two years. It’s really the product of touring and meeting a lot of talented artists on the road and through a mutual appreciation of one another’s work we agreed to remix each other’s tracks. I love it when someone can have a take on something that took you a long time to assemble and take it in a completely different direction. All of the remixes were done as part of a swap arrangement since budgets were tight and it was eye-opening to see how other artists put their tracks together.”
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