Doom Trip Records presents American Electric: Remixes from Reflecting on a Dying Man, a remix album of the utmost caliber - forged in the emotionally tumultuous electronic mayhem of Diamondstein’s 2019 Reflecting on a Dying Man, a masterful collection of compositions drawn from an deeply moving time experienced by Diamondstein on a return trip to home to be with his family during the last days of his father.

American Electric features remixes by How to Dress Well, Maral, The Album Leaf, and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco, in addition to a remix and a new track by Diamondstein. Each producer who worked on this remix album brought their own unique perspective to the original album’s themes of death, loss, disease, and self-reflection.

American Electric opens with The Album Leaf’s mix of Chemical Valley, which is a wide-open ambient exploration, with big swells of energy and mechanical voices. Next is Maral’s Rumors of a Crime, drenched in grimy static and pulses of digitized gloom.

A driving and meditative mix of 2nd Floor Studio is provided by Jas Shaw. The track is a long-player full of kinetic reverberations. The diamond man himself makes an appearance at the heart of the album with Empty in a Time of Need, a burner of a song that reads like a meandering journal entry scrawled across a ragged stack of coffee stained pages, opening with a grinding bass line and spreading out into a slowly expanding universe of orbiting audio. How to Dress Well takes on The Mountaineer, a hazy rendition haunted by echoing vocals that undulate through layers of memory, faded by time.

The closing piece is an eerie rework of Someday You’ll Have This Too that takes the original concept and re-imagines the relentless bass line and churning rhythm with chattering music boxes and diaphanous wisps of partially remembered walks down the streets of another time, only a few years behind, and yet a part of another life.

Overall, American Electric is a remix presentation that offers a rarity - a chance to revisit a great musical experience from entirely different angles, experiencing the emotional thrust behind the artistry without repeating what has come before. It is like returning to that place to hear a little more of the story, pick up on some details you missed the first time around, not because you weren’t listening, but because they were hidden beneath other folds of the story, awaiting the dusty pages to be turned yet again.

Gray Lee