Tangled Up In Blues

This isn't a unique idea; Moby used it on that multi million seller album of his ( though with more of an overt pop sensibility ) and the R L Burnside disk I posted about near the start of this blog incorporates similar techniques on some tracks. But I still love this album, Tangle Eye Alan Lomax's Southern Journey Remixed, and think it the most successful I have heard in this vein. To make the idea explicit, the archive recordings made by Alan Lomax on his field trip through the rural south are treated with various electronic "beats" but the essential human element is provided by the playing that is also added of current musicians who are steeped in the feel of the south from New Orleans to the rural backwaters of the Mississippi. The reworkings are apposite and varied too, from boogie to reggae, gospel to country and funk. Most of it is pretty damn danceable too. But through it all, the thing that hits home are the mysterious voices of the old timers calling through the ether and fixing the past as a foreign country. The album is lively and fun but the essential respect to the core material is there.