The 49ers and Masters At Work get a Fist fusion: link repaired and edit improved!

UPDATE June 2010: three of the Masters At Work mixes have turned up on iTunes here! Still hoping the dubs will come out...I guess I knew that Masters At Work (MAW) had remixed borderline-cheesy italo house group The 49ers back in 1992, but the mixes never came out on CD (never came out in Europe at all actually), and over the years I gathered that if I hadn't heard them, well, they probably weren't very good.

This week, going through my ever-longer list of retro blogs with killer mixes from the 90s, I came across a new blog - definitely for me - called MAW Forever. There's some amazing stuff on there, precisely from their most fertile period, and a little down the page was "The Message" by 49ers. I have the CD single with another great Italian mix called the Gradualswingroundub, but after downloading the MAW mixes (seven of them!) I found at least three that I thought were really great!

They did, however, need a little work. The '12" vocal' and 'Dub Two' both had to be de-clicked, but de-clicking the 'Vocal dub' took all the force out the drum line, and I ended up having to remove clicks - or as many as I could - manually in order to keep the sound quality. Then I boosted the levels of all three mixes, joined the vocal and the dub (removing some of the dub that I found a bit repeptitive, and adding and extra bass effect at one point to suit my fancy) and then joined the Dub Two onto the end.

The result is nearly fifteen minutes of non-stop classic Masters At Work, and a great song. I'm really pleased with it. The vocal dub is simple but strong, and the Dub Two changes tack while keeping continuity. This is why I love re-editing on the computer. And why I love blogs!

Click here to download my Jason Fist re-edit of The Message by The 49ers.