Kwabs – Walk (Sasha remix–Cold Duck re-edit)
A more dancefloor-friendly edit I gave Sasha’s remix of “Walk” by Kwabs.
I’d rate Kwabs up there with Seal for intensely-cool debut material–I just wish he could put it all together as an album. Any of his digital EPs are worth a few bucks, although it is annoying that Sasha’s fantastic 10+ treatment of “Walk” is a bit hard to pin down a copy of legally.
While I dearly love Sasha’s mix of “Walk,” I know without trying it’d be a dud with most dancing folk here in the US–too long, too much build-up. So, here I paste together a more to-the-point edit. It’s only at the end that I let things go on a bit, but actually (when spinning for the attention-deficit estadounidense), I’d suggest a fade around 6:15.
A later note:
I’d long considered, and eventually rejected, the idea of a rework of Sasha’s remix. The full 10+ remix he did of the song earlier this year is simply perfect … except that it’s not particularly danceable for most of its duration. So I kept on kicking this one around in my head. On one drive home I began to imagine how it might sound if I were to layer Kwabena’s vocals (which appear during breaks in the directly stated beat) over the instrumental groove sections of Sasha’s remix, where beat and synthesizers abound.
It turned out to be an easy re-edit, since–if you’ve got the funk–Sasha’s remix is actually quite groovy throughout (you just gotta feel the beat in a lot of places), and so the vocal sits effortlessly atop beats and synths. I spent more time carefully tweaking the mix I’d already made than in putting it together in the first place. That’s a good thing.
It also turned out really well, I think. The song is now catchy in all the right places, and it never drags the way the full remix does at times. I especially love an unintended effect I created around the two-minute mark, where the second verse is sequenced with a loop (from a different part of Sasha’s remix) of the essential idea in this song:
But the pressure’s pushin’ me back again
DJ Cold Duck 