- There are some tracks that don't work at home; they need big rooms filled with people and walls to rattle in the middle of night. "Sculpture" is one of those tracks. Played quietly, it's a pleasant loopy affair but push the volume closer to ten and suddenly you're dealing with an overdriven monster that rings like you caught your head inside of a church bell. A lunatic carol of bells rolls and crashes through a tough bank of snares, scissor snips, and metallic scrapes—it's enough to keep you dancing like an idiot for four minutes, but where a break in the action would have been the perfect thing, Speedy J and George Issakidis pile on the special effects and, unless there's another track coming into the mix, you're left wondering what you got so worked up about.
Sculpture comes with an "original 1989" version, too. Remember maxi-single cassettes? Sometimes you'd get a club mix or a "midnite edit" with a handclap and an extra two-minutes tacked onto the end. The trend peaked for me in 1989 when Digital Underground released the "Just Throw a Breakbeat Under There" remix of "Doowutchyalike" and the alternate mix of "Sculpture" works in the same lazy way: opening with a bit of vinyl crackle, burying the bells deeper in the mix, and replacing the aggressive snares with a few old school 808 kicks and some cheeky crossfader action. This version works simply because it's not wildly different from the original: same descent into knob-twiddling without much to get invested in. A bad-ass DJ tool, but not something you'd want to bring home at night.
Tracklist01. Sculpture
02. Sculpture (1989 Version)