It’s never a bad day when new Mr. Carmack appears on the SoundCloud feed.
Mr. Carmack hasn’t uploaded any new tracks to his SoundCloud page for nearly a full year now, so fans were caught off guard with the unannounced release of three new remixes this past week. The producer legend has been hard at work touring for much of this time, having most recently played at Destructo‘s Friendship 2024 (the festival presumably had something to do with the release of these tracks given its logo pasted in the cover art for each, but it’s unclear exactly how). In true Carmack fashion, the silent hard work in the studio suddenly comes to light with a completely unannounced drop of new music.
Southside and Lil’ Yachty get the remix treatment for the first track, ‘gimme da lite.’ The original, released at the end of last year, is what can only be described as quintessential trap music. This flip transforms it into a ghetto house-derived footwork banger. The broken beats and pitched-up vocals make this flip one for the footwork specialists in the club, a far cry from the trap arm-flailing mood of the original song.
Love Regenerator (an alias of Calvin Harris) and Steve Lacy (formerly a guitarist for The Internet and now a successful solo singer-songwriter) are up next with the ‘live without your love’ remix. The original is an ode to house music replete with acidy synths and Lacy’s sultry R&B-style vocals. Once again Carmack flips the vibe on its head here. A slow, undulating bassline pervades the entire song, interrupted occasionally only by the sound of police sirens and Lacy’s voice. As one commenter so eloquently put it, this is like Shades meets Mr. Carmack.
Carmack takes a step back in time for the third flip with a remix of Who Da Funk’s ‘Shiny Disco Balls,’ one of the top UK dance singles of 2002. Despite being an over 20 year-old track at this point, Carmack has found a way to breathe new life into it with what is arguably the standout track of these three new releases. By dropping nearly all of the instrumentation that established the original song as a eurohouse bop and leaving only the vocal sample, this flip is where Carmack’s production truly shines through. The 90s rave aesthetic of the vocals is quickly replaced after the first minute of the song when Carmack’s signature grungy bass kicks in. This is a flip that wouldn’t have felt out of place on DEMOLISH or the Red EP.
The unforeseen release of these remixes feels like a bygone remnant of the cryptic drip-feeding of tunes that Carmack fans received in the mid-2010s golden era of SoundCloud. If this is at all indicative of a return to that time, a return to sporadic releases of top-tier tracks that might not be there the next day, then we should all welcome it with open arms. Keep an eye on your feeds, folks, because you never know what might pop up.
