Six years after the release of their audacious and much-acclaimed bootleg remix album, Stolen Voices, London/Berlin trio White Label returned with their first album of legitimate remixes, Borrowed Voices, featuring Paul Weller, Mark Eitzel, Emma Pollock, Erland Cooper & Hannah Peel (of The Magnetic North) and the late, great Associates singer Billy MacKenzie.
2011’s Stolen Voices reimagined a different musical past by creating elaborate, full band arrangements around the vocals from rare demos by the likes of David Bowie, John Lennon, Dennis Wilson and The Supremes. The Guardian praised White Label for “using technology to write their own version of musical history”, while on BBC 6Music Jarvis Cocker described Stolen Voices as “great…a really interesting album” and Lauren Laverne called it “a mean feat of alchemy…and totally excellent.”
When White Label’s successive release, the 1972 EP (featuring Neil Young, Marc Bolan and Roberta Flack) received plays on daytime Radio 2 from Laverne and Dermot O’Leary, the trio – Steve Aungle, Anth Brown, Tom Doyle – realised that their cheekily illegal experiment had maybe proved too successful.
As a result, though, the band began to be approached by artists looking for official remixes, the cream of which make up Borrowed Voices: from their slow-lane psychedelic soul take on Paul Weller’s Phoenix, the Laurel Canyon acid ballad Gold Dreaming by Amy Boone (of Portland, Oregon band The Delines) to their string-driven version of The Magnetic North’s High Life.
Newer artists who feature include the trippy funk remix of Greek, London-based singer Aphty Khea’s Onyx Glitz, which is now released as a single via The Sound Of Everything UK.