Record Collection, 2,500 Metres Up

You catch people differently at altitude. The thin air makes everything slightly unreal—conversations happen faster, pretense is harder to maintain, and the person standing in front of you feels more like a person. That’s how we ended up talking to Mark Ronson on a sunny Thursday afternoon near the top of an Austrian mountain, minutes before he was due to play a DJ set in a palace of ice at the Snowbombing Festival.

Record Collection had become something I genuinely loved by that point—not the useful-playlist kind of love, but the kind where you reach for it when nothing else quite fits. Ronson knew it had landed well. He was loose and easy, already running on a good week’s momentum, and mentioned almost in passing that a remix project was underway. The next single will definitely come out of my new baby, he said, because the thing is full of fantastic collaborations and you should use them. The list was considerable: Boy George, MNDR, Ghostface Killah, assembled over a long stretch working out of Brooklyn. The creative atmosphere in this place was simply not of this world, he said about that period, and the careful phrasing made it sound more genuine, not less—the way people reach for precision when they’re trying to describe something they don’t want to undersell.

He called it his best album, without hedging. Then he went and played the set—up there in the ice palace, sun behind the slope, the crowd doing that tentative Alpine shuffle that turns into actual dancing when you stop watching it. He was probably right.