Soon - Japancakes (Sonic Cathedral)

Wooziness, mmm, it's great. Floaty, drifty, spacey sounds that fill the world with downy clouds and lazily spiralling dust motes. Wooziness is Japancakes' stock-in-trade. They use that most deliciously laconic of instruments, the pedal steel guitar, to great effect, invoking a fug of dreamy well-being in their songs that makes you just want to, well, pass out. In a good way.

Last year, Japancakes 'controversially' put all their wooziness powers into creating a marshmallowy instrumental version of My Bloody Valentines 'Loveless'. Yes the whole album. With pedal steel and cello taking the place of the original's gauzey, distanced vocals. It's a great album if you fancy a spot of cross-eyed ,wibbling, other-dimensional lift-muzak. Which we all do now and then don't we? Apparently we don't as a few shoegazey blow-hards have kicked off about Japancakes' experiments with 'Loveless'. Ho hum.

Anyway, now the ever delightful Sonic Cathedral are putting out two remixes of Japancakes' versions of MBV's 'Soon' and 'Touched' on double A-sided 7" white vinyl. Nice.

'Soon' has been roughed up into a hedgehog ball of spikes by James Rutledge. Juddery, Christ-the-cd's-stuck! messed up beats. Where the original see-sawed sinuously, this fits and skitters curiously.

Ricardo Tobar takes 'Touched' and stretches it into a vast Balearic summer space-out. The original - a brief between-track soundscape shimmer - is sent reeling through hyperspace on a dubby, clubby bassbeat. Trippy whalesong echoes of Japancakes' gliding guitar noise rise and fall across fathoms of...I'm trying not to say 'blissed out' here, but, hell, that's what it is...a blissed out sonic skyscape.

http://www.soniccathedral.co.uk/