Ultra Naté - Party Girl (1995)

Just a couple of years before the abominable 'Free' - probably the song that single-handedly made crap garage popular - Ultra Naté was still making great records. This one was part of the soundtrack for indy film Party Girl starring Parker Posey, the story of a clubber who becomes a librarian to prove to her aunt that you can dance all night and still master the Dewey Decimal System by day.

I don't think the film was a great success; it's not even available on DVD outside of the USA, although there was a spinoff TV series apparently. Funnily enough, the director, Daisy Von Scherler Mayer (I'm not making this up) recently directed an episode of my favourite series Mad Men. Take a look at the trailer...



Lord knows what goes on in the film that is forbidden for under-17s. Anyway, you can hear the Ultra Naté track in the background near the end, and the Satoshi Tomiie mixes that I've tinkered with mix old school piano-driven garage with hard house elements very cleverly. It's almost a little too hard for me at times, but I think the track has stood the test of time, and the slightly hysterical elements reflect the theme of the film pretty well.

I took the vocal mix and the dub to make a 16-minute track that starts hard, goes vocal, then goes hard again. Tomiie isn't afraid of an old school breakdown, although back in 1995 I suppose it was just 'a breakdown'. Check out my version below.

You can download Ultra Naté -

Party Girl (Satoshi Tomiie Interpretation/Hardshell Fist fusion) (32MB) by clicking the download arrow on the player above.

General Public - I'll Take You There (1994)

1994, hell yeah! How can you possibly go wrong with Satoshi Tomiie remixing, aided and abetted by Johnny Vicious and Lem Springsteen?

Nevertheless, it could have been a disaster. This dodgy cover of a Staples Singers classic got a cod reggae treatment for the soundtrack of slightly dodgy-looking 90s film Threesome. The film's French title was "2 boys, 1 girl, 3 possibilities" a less concise title that accurately describes the plotline.

Anyway, after having a track on the Weird Science soundtrack and Ferris Bueller's Day Off,  General Public seemed a natural choice for Threesome; black but not too black, singing a cover version... both the tracks and the films had only mitigated success, but at least they gace us some rather ace remixes.

At the time, Sony often released 12"s and CD-singles with different mixes on each (the 12" catering more for the club crowd). Although the Hoya Tribe Trip is easy to find on CD, the Satoshi Tomiie Experience has never been released digitally, so I did a vinyl rip and cleaned it up for you. The mix is subtly but significantly different, although it also contains a slow-it-down-speed-it-up-again section, very much in fashion in the time. I have to admit it's one of my favourite tricks in a house track. Have a listen:



The Satoshi Tomiie remixes manage to turn what could have been a a train wreck into a decent piece of music. Not an absolute classic perhaps, but a commendable salvage job to be sure. Unfortunately, as is often the case for unsuccessful singles from defunct groups, it's only available second hand (which doesn't earn the label or the artist any money), so I think it's legitimate to let you download the two mixes in question in high-quality AAC.

You can get General Public's
 I'll Take You There (Satoshi Tomiie Experience) here (18MB)
and I'll Take You There (Hoya Tribe Trip) here (15MB).

Music was better in 1994/1995

Sorry, but I really do think so.

For example, the concept for this record from 1995 sounds like the worst idea ever; take a soppy power ballad by Foreigner and do a wailing diva garage remix. Run away, run away!

No, come back.

Satoshi Tomiie, part of the New York Def Mix team (David Morales, Frankie Knuckles...) was at the peak of his form in 1995. He simply dropped Terri Symon's original lilting FM-friendly vocal, used a different take of the song at house tempo (obviously recorded especially with a house mix in mind), and created a positively blazing, absolute classic remix. Dripping with drama from start to finish (ie, it's a bit gay), the long piano intro leads into a song which is now completely unrecognisable from the original version. Only at the very end does the original chorus get a look in, but by that time you're hooked, you've been had, but you're happy.

In the end, the song's gospel-led chorus of "I want to feel what love is, I know you can show me" turns out to be perfect garage fodder.

Remixers would often also do a dub of the same song for mixing in the harder clubs, and Satoshi's dub of this track was also to be a masterpiece. Darker, with stabbing chords, searing high vocals and a sense of foreboding, it also happened to be at the same tempo as the vocal mix.

It was just too tempting to not put them together.

So here you have it: the Jason Fist re-edit (14'25") of the Satoshi Tomiie club and dub mixes! Heaven for garage lovers, probably hell for everyone else. What I especially like is that you can't quite tell where the two segue. Although it was one of my first edits, and the track is now twelve years old, I still listen to this with the same pleasure.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: they don't make them like this any more. The amount of work put into this track is incredible.

Too much for you? Here is the video to the Foreigner original, all in slow motion, very 9 1/2 weeks in parts, with a lot of studio session footage that we are supposed to believe is really them recording, and a truly sick-inducing ending (hint: he finds out what love is).

Also included below, for the kitsch factor, is the radio version of the Terri Symon track before it got remixed to destruction. Yuck! I think you'll find the garage version a little less sickly...