Give You Everything

Remixes are commonly the most intolerable thing about techno music. They rarely amount to little more than faffing about with the uninspired sound of a song and creating a version every bit as staid as the original. This process is to music what coloring books are to painting ? the pieces have been provided, so the artist just needs to dutifully fill in everything as creatively as possible.

On techno singer Erika Jayne's "Give You Everything," the assembled DJs color outside the lines and smear everything with black and tan crayons; the album is a hideous, bloated monstrosity.

"Everything" was a track from Jayne's debut album, "Pretty Mess." With this record, "Mess" is certainly correct: The album consists of the title track and nine remixes thereof done by obscure electronica artists with noms-de-club like DJ Escape, Mike Rizzo and Moto Blanco.

When an album only comprises different versions of a song that isn't particularly good to begin with, tedium rears its ugly head within minutes of the opening track. This is aggravated by the absurd running lengths of every remix: The shortest clock in at six-and-a-half minutes while the longest exceed eight. Most symphonies feel shorter than this. Every song is also marred not only by repetition but also uncreative production values, with most tracks simply reorganizing song elements such as the bass, beats or even vocals, with little to no difference between them.

In theory, remixing a song should give an artist unlimited possibilities to explore, deconstruct and create new music simply by toying with an existing song's basic structure. Why, then, do almost all remixes become uncreative, indistinguishable, monotonous failed experiments? "Everything" does not offer an answer, but certainly serves as evidence for why the question must be posed.