f the remix is homo sapiens, then the re-edit was homo erectus, the forerunner without which nothing else would be possible (but was inevitably doomed to extinction). Except it seems the re-edit is back. EMI have released a CD collecting a slew of 12”s originally released on the OST label as OST/Original Block Party Edits, classic dancefloor tracks chopped in worthy but generally bloodless style by Norman Cook, DJ Touché, Tim ‘Love’ Lee et al. UK edit pioneer Greg Wilson has compiled some of his old and new edits on the Tirk Records release Credit to the Edit Volume One. And Betty Botox has stepped into the fray, initially with a 12” of Kraut rock chops and now with this LP, which attempts to alchemically transform a wide selection of music from gold into, uh, more malleable and mixable gold.

In the early seventies there was no access to the master tapes for DJs who increasingly wanted, needed, to extend and reshape soul and R&B cuts in order to keep the dancefloor alive and squirming. Instead what was available was reel-to-reel tape, a razorblade, the original record and a lot of time and patience. By repeatedly rerecording carefully selected parts of a record, slicing out bars at a time and taping them back together, sometimes adding effects, the edit pioneers could lose the dead areas of a song and draw out the rhythmically hot parts. They could entirely restructure tracks, force them to work in a new way, but only using the same content that was available to everyone else, that on the vinyl. This was painfully slow, precise and labour intensive work. When Tom Moulton constructed a forty-five minute tape of re-edits in 1972, the ur-text of what would become remixing, it took him eighty hours of work.

The increased influence of seventies and early-eighties disco sonics on dance music over the past couple of years is one reason for the return of the re-edit. The other is more prosaic, that the shift from analogue storage, like vinyl and tape, to hard disk removes a hell of a lot of the repetitive, frustrating and eye straining work from the edit. Computer audio editors like Sound Forge make even millisecond edits a snap, and creating repeated sections is now a matter of copying and pasting with keyboard shortcuts rather than physically recopying and cutting tape (and then recopying and cutting and….) Effects are only a mouse click away. All that’s necessary now to do a good re-edit is taste.

And that’s where Betty Botox comes in. One half of non-denominational Glasgow DJ team Optimo, she knows how to make a club sweat. On her under-the-counter double LP (no properly identified tracks here) there are some of the expected funk and soul re-edits, like Dennis Coffey’s heavy seventies Motor City drum breaks with squirming acid lines piled on top or Rose Royce’s “Is it Love You’re After” reconfigured so that the initial synth pulse continues to writhe throughout and the S! Express! horn stabs continually attempt to spear anyone dancing. But as might be hoped from an Optimo spin-off it’s more all over the record shop than that. Nowhere else would you find a dance-mix of the distended post-punk sino-skiffle of English anarchists Crass’s “Nagasaki Nightmare” or a version of The Leather Nun’s “Fist Fuckers Incorporated” sliced so that the S&M elements are shoved so far upfront that it sounds like some lost Skatt Bros track. (It still really bugs me that he says prostrate not prostate, though.)

The cut of Richie Havens “Going Back to my Roots” puts the piano front and centre, like hands-in-the-air early nineties Italian house. The sound is slightly thickened and muggy as the time stretch algorithms in the Ableton Live software quantise the track into a mixable form. “Shake” by the Shadows of Knight is the opposite of most of the edits, uncompressing the pop blast of the original and smoothing out the dynamics, making it sound like the endlessly looping proto-disco Euro-pop of the Equals.

In the end, the tracks that are most addictively fun here are probably those that simply take disco snippets and intensify them. The tumbling piano and junkyard percussion of the Impossible Dreamers, the continually rolling bass and analogue blat of Jeff Mill’s fave “Space Bass” by Slick and, best of all, a version of “Shoot Your Shot” by Divine that centres on its “I Feel Love” synth percolations and the claves patterns, ditching everything else save the vocals.

And if these tracks don’t suit your needs? Then make your own. It’s easy.