Difference Tones

A good remix is an argument. It says: here’s what was already inside this song that the original missed, or buried, or didn’t know how to reach. The best ones feel inevitable in retrospect—like they were always the true version, and the original was just a sketch toward them.

That fall, the songs worth remixing were obvious. Coexist had just arrived, and The xx were already the kind of band who invited deconstruction—their music so minimal that even small additions transformed the whole thing. A producer adding a single synthesizer line to one of their tracks could shift the entire emotional weather. Bon Iver’s self-titled record from the year before was still everywhere, Justin Vernon’s layered falsetto becoming source material for anyone who wanted to understand what he’d actually built and whether it could be taken somewhere else. Purity Ring were newer and stranger, Megan James’s vocals suspended in the particular fog that Corin Roddick had engineered around them—something in that combination begged to be unraveled and reassembled.

Remixes were how a lot of us consumed music that year anyway. Not album deep-dives so much as lateral moves—finding a version of a song that arrived at the same feeling from a different direction. An hour of alternative routes to the same place. The acoustics term for what happens when two close frequencies interact is "difference tone"—you hear a third pitch that wasn’t played. That’s what the best remixes do. Something new emerges from the gap between the original and its revision.