Released earlier in the year, Darcy Baylis's Envelopes EP and its title track stand as one of the strongest releases to come out of Melbourne in 2015. It's a stunning meditation on house that pushes the genre into nuanced new territory. As a year-end victory lap, "Envelopes" has enjoyed a pair of new reworks from likeminded production duo Aiya and mysterious beatmaker Nico Nique.Stream the remixes below, and view each remixer's statement – plus the video for the original track – after the embed.Aiya:
"We started by looking at Darcy's lyrics, and taking a few lines that connected with us. We wanted to take the story and retell it in a way that blended sounds from both worlds. We were listening to a lot of Turkish records from Ayten's Dad and Grandad's collection, and found some cultural sounds that could be manipulated to support the lyrics. It was interesting to combine these elements with Darcy's voice and personal signature house sounds. Our goal was to bring the essence of the original track onto a more spacious, surreal, and slowed-down dancefloor… we have also secretly choreographed a dance to it."Nico Nique:
"Darcy has a really assured manner of building momentum and energy in these tracks that doesn't come off as calculated or pandering, which is refreshing in a 4/4 template. "Variations on Memory" jumped out at me the most though, I think it's the way that wack bassline just plods through the entire track, building so much tension and then floating off at the end. To me, it's the one of most unusual but effective "drops" I've heard in a long time. With the remix, I felt I shouldn't or couldn't try to make a functional track with what Darcy had given me to rework, I felt I couldn't do it justice. It'd be like that cleaner who painted over that 19th-century fresco of Jesus in Spain, not quite the point or the right idea. Instead, I took the core elements of the track, and re-arranged them in a somewhat liminal dance space – a kind of free-floating grime world – trying to put my own spin on Darcy's creation.
"We started by looking at Darcy's lyrics, and taking a few lines that connected with us. We wanted to take the story and retell it in a way that blended sounds from both worlds. We were listening to a lot of Turkish records from Ayten's Dad and Grandad's collection, and found some cultural sounds that could be manipulated to support the lyrics. It was interesting to combine these elements with Darcy's voice and personal signature house sounds. Our goal was to bring the essence of the original track onto a more spacious, surreal, and slowed-down dancefloor… we have also secretly choreographed a dance to it."Nico Nique:
"Darcy has a really assured manner of building momentum and energy in these tracks that doesn't come off as calculated or pandering, which is refreshing in a 4/4 template. "Variations on Memory" jumped out at me the most though, I think it's the way that wack bassline just plods through the entire track, building so much tension and then floating off at the end. To me, it's the one of most unusual but effective "drops" I've heard in a long time. With the remix, I felt I shouldn't or couldn't try to make a functional track with what Darcy had given me to rework, I felt I couldn't do it justice. It'd be like that cleaner who painted over that 19th-century fresco of Jesus in Spain, not quite the point or the right idea. Instead, I took the core elements of the track, and re-arranged them in a somewhat liminal dance space – a kind of free-floating grime world – trying to put my own spin on Darcy's creation.