TORN HAWK AND KAREN GWYER - 'COWBOYS (FOR KAREN)' 12"

Michigan via London producer Karen Gwyer's debut album 'Needs Continuum' was released in Feb 2013. It's a deeply personal homage to classic house and deconstructed psychedelia built on organic cyclical rhythms and tempered synth washes. Dazed and Confused called it "impressively unusual and poignant.. a uniquely dark, brooding and slow-burning masterpiece", FACTMagazine "an intimate and beautiful record", and it was released to acclaim following the birth of her son.

Before release, Karen passed tracks to visual artist and producer Luke Wyatt - aka Brooklyn, NYC's Torn Hawk (L.I.E.S Records) - for a remix. The music returned was not presented as a single track, but a 35 min "suite of deformations" of the original material.

Presented as "Cowboys (For Karen)", the EP is eerily unrecognisable from the source material. Wyatt - whose art website's biog states "a longstanding obsession with elevating decay and the thrown-away" - has supplemented the ambient, natural feel of Gwyer's work with jagged guitar lines and intense, unpredictable Kraut rhythms. Where "Needs Continuum" was built for headphone listening, tracks such as 'Gauze (Sped)' twist Gwyer's coo-ing vocals and intuitive percussive pulses into limitlessly astounding turns of pumping, marginalised, mutant avant-dance.