Description
Joe Claussell reimagines the Alan Parsons Project's masterpiece, which fused late-1970s progressive rock with electronic sensibilities, into spiritual dance music.
Alan Parsons was highly acclaimed as an engineer and worked on The Beatles' "Abbey Road" and Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon". This release features remixes by Joe Claussell, a leading figure in the New York house and spiritual dance scene, of tracks from "I Robot", a classic album by The Alan Parsons Project led by Alan Parsons.
The source material, "I Robot", is known as a concept album exploring the relationship between humans and technology. This release selects "The Voice" and "I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You" from the album. While preserving the original's epic narrative and futuristic sound, Joe Claussell breathes new life into them with his signature extended arrangements.
In "The Voice", dramatic strings and synthesizers layer upon one another, creating an impressive build-up of slowly intensifying euphoria. "I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You" is reconstructed around rock-derived guitars and rhythms, transforming it into a groove designed for the dance floor.
True to Joe Claussell's long-standing exploration of the intersection between mechanical rhythms and human emotion, the release offers a breadth that touches on rock, disco, deep house, and spiritual jazz. It is a compelling work that respects the appeal of the original tracks while bringing out a new dimension as club music.
A1. The Voice (Joaquin Joe Claussell Edit)
B1. I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You (Joaquin Joe Claussell Edit)
SP-200-A1
SP-200-B1
Leave it to Joe Claussell to tap into our current collective artificial intelligence anxiety and render the racket divine. Alan Parson’s 1977 I Robot—the LP from which these two new edits were culled—was a harbinger for all the technological sheen and humanistic distress that was to come. Drawing from heady science fiction and even headier musicality and studio sophistication, ’The Voice’ evoked Jeremy Bentham-like omniscient surveillance, while the original ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You’ explores the ambivalent rift in perspective between the two poles of flesh and metal. For Claussell, the dichotomy leaves more unanswered questions and artistic possibilities, for the truth is always tangled and ripe for potential. Our bodies are propelled by the same electrons which accumulate in capacitors; our hearts, as Milford Graves was so enthralled, likewise transmit the same electric impulses which not only sustain our bodies but soundtrack our eternal, internal rhythm. These edits, with their strings, synthesizers and distortion-ravaged guitars, are protracted to dynamic sublimity, and seem aware of this seemingly opposing dynamic. Claussell, himself a lifelong proponent and interrogator of man’s relationship with mechanized rhythm and sound, leaves our earthly toil and unease behind for something greater, something yet unnamed, shared between us all at our finest. It's almost a feeling you can touch in the air…
