Freelancer Jess Harvell has written for the Seattle Weekly, Village Voice, Spin, Chicago Reader, Wired, City Pages, Stereo-Type, and other publications with more money than sense. He obsessively preens in public at Blackie Lawless Fanclub. He’s also single, a Pisces, and his favorite member of Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem is the racially vague sax player with the yellow nose.

Scarface– I Seen A Man Die (4Hero Remix)

Really, the perfect remix: both artists at their peak, the remixer enhancing qualities of the original while stamping their own mark on it. This is Scarface in old ghetto prophet mode; someone opens his jaw and pours wood finish down it, takes pocketknife and carves worrylines all over his face, tattoos perma-tears on each cheek. (Somewhere a young Gift of Gab was miming this in front of his bedroom mirror into a Goody comb.) Someone shoved a DAT into a FedEx mailer and tossed it across the pond to 4Hero who were scaling such great heights that vertigo forced them to hide behind great black music ancient to the future for the rest of their career for fear of falling flat on their faces. A lonely gunshot rings out and then Dego and Mac bootup one of those duck, dive and roll percussion patterns they were once so good at. A bass swell the size of a canyon opens underfoot and Face does his best to fill in the space with caramel yarns about the kind of young brothers who trade human lives for pole position while grasping at spit bubbles of basic human morality. It’s the red flag to the Enforcers’ bull: interrogation of black masculinity, that weird verse where suddenly we’re in the afterlife (or outerspace?), hip-hop pressure and soul weight. The result is the creation of a genre that could have been (but never really was): conscious jungle.

[visit Scarface’s website here, buy 4Hero’s The Remix Album here, read Brett Berliner’s Stylus review of The Fix here]

Jeru Tha Damaja– Me or the Papes (Dillinja Remix)

Dillinja (sigh). Where did it all go wrong for you, Karl? Your tracks were so effortlessly funky, and that very effortlessness was your greatest slight of hand considering how tightly edited they were, shoulders hunched, brow furrowed, eyes focused on the drawing table, penciling in tiny slivers of snare and one-shot ride cymbal. Now you just bang on the tea kettle and record your dog’s farts through a distortion pedal.

Jeru (sigh). Where did it all go wrong for you, man? You didn’t just command the mic, you made it dress up in ladies panties and bark like a dog. You sounded so hungry you could see the ribs. But then you started believing you could take shots at the throne, dissing Bad Boy when Biggie was still alive (and, sir, I knew Christopher Wallace, and you were no Christopher Wallace.) Now you release albums no one ever hears on Internet labels. Who do you think you are, Chuck D?

Anyway, this is probably the last good thing either of you were involved in, and if I needed to find a track that perfectly captures NYC at dusk in late summer, this is the one.

[visit Dillinja’s website here, buy Bass in Your Face: Maximum Drum & Bass here]

The Streets– Has It Come To This? (High Contrast Remix)

Whimsy has never been one of dnb’s key virtues (throw a bunch of red-eyed paranoids in a near dark, smoky, enclosed space and you won’t probably won’t come up with the rave version of They Might Be Giants either.) High Contrast is best known for his 21st century overhauls of major classics (Omni Trio’s “Renegade Snares”, FSOL’s “Papua New Guinea”…someone might want to tell him its unbecoming to address your elders by their first name) and disco-dnb so anodyne you could perform outpatient surgery on his twelves. But this bootleg Streets track is a regular ol’ knee slappin hoot. The dunderheaded beat from Andy C & Shimon’s “Bodyrock” (they call it “clownstep” cuz the Dungeons & Dragons geeks who currently run dnb hate fun) (also: compare and contrast with schaffel) and the bassline from Double99’s “RIPgroove”, the “You Really Got Me” of speed garage. I have no idea what that means, but I think once you hear it you may understand.

[visit The Streets’ website here, buy the “Don’t Mug Yourself” single here, read Nick Southall’s Stylus review of A Grand Don’t Come For Free here]