Silver Screen Shower Scene (Thin White Duke Remix)

Silver Screen Shower Scene Thin White Duke remix this is song was 71st on RAs list of the top hundred tracks of the 00's. I must have heard this at work, but I must of been really zoned into my Excel sheet or whatever I was paying attention to because I totally didn't notice it at all. That said, when I heard this at home it grabbed me.

This song does a lot of things well. The big thing its succeeds at is being really kinetic and having a lot of energy; the song drives, moves forward, and is energizing to listen to.

The next thing I'll note is that the song builds up really well. You can't build up continuously over almost 9 minutes and start at any reasonable level or finish at any reasonable level, so you need to reset somewhere midway through or you just need to be unreasonable at one end or the other. (The champions of build ups, Sigur Ros, can build for 9 minutes because they start super quiet and end super intense and are unreasonable on both ends, but Its great so that's fine.)

The way Silver Screen manages to build up so well while staying at good intensity throughout is great transitions. Anyone who knows me knows I'm pretty critical of bad transitions but this song does it really well. The transitions throughout most of the middle of the song make very effective use of negative space. Typically, it will build up and there will be vocal samples. As the vocals are repeating, the song will focus your attention on them and then a lot of the music will drop out in a very organic natural seeming way while your attention is on the vocals. Then the music kicks back in at a lower intensity to continue building pretty much throughout the whole song.

Part of what makes the transitions feel so natural is that the expectation for how they'll work mechanically is set up at the very beginning. The song opens with some strings and then some male vocal samples and after short period of time while the male vocal sample is playing the strings go away never to return and the song proper starts right as the male samples fade out not to return until towards the very end. That introduction sets the listeners mind to expect the negative space in transition as the voices are speaking and so it feels natural throughout the rest of the song.

Another nice things about this track is that the vocal samples actually help the song. A lot of techno that I've listened to so far have vocal samples that are value destructive. In future posts you'll hear more about this. I gripe a little about the male vocalist in the first half of emerge, but as I cover more tracks this may be a recurring theme. But not so here, to the vocals at the front part of the song aren't great but go away quickly and the female vocals samples are pretty good. They actually remind me a lot of Ladytron on 604 which came out in 2001. I think the original track here also came out in 2001 (although this remixed is 2002) perhaps that's just what the vocal sound was at that point in time either way vocals sound good. Their basic message is something that's obviously been done before which is to remind people of the fundamental toxicity of the floating world while being completely of it. It's been done before because it's basically a good message and if it works, why change a winning formula.

Lastly one of the synths is vaguely reminiscent of the 1980s synths that the Ghostbusters theme song uses.