Delerium - Odyssey - The Remix Collection

Back in the eighties I learned pretty quickly how to avoid bad remixes. Then, as now, the words "additional production and remix" are a dead giveaway that some hack got their hands on a marketable song, chopped it to pieces, added explosions, repeats, breaks, etc without bothering to listen to or even to like the original. The goal always seems to be to get as far away from the original as possible, as if a remix is only good if the changes are really obvious.

On the other extreme, ther have been people like Joseph Watt at Razormaid, who would typically stick to cleaning up and re-editing elements already present in the original track. When it's hard to tell that a song's been re-edited and extended, if it sounds like something the artist might have done themselves, it's a good remix.

Bill Leeb produces some awesome electronic tracks, but he doesn't make "trance" music. This CD sounds like cookie cutter trance, sprinkled with cheese with elements of Delerium songs thrown in as an afterthought. Although Greg Reely's remixes are more restrained than the rest, they are nonetheless strangled to death in this horrible attempt by the label to cash in.

I kinda suspect Bill Leeb had very little if any control over this release. I'd be surprised if he even met any of the production team. It sure doesn't sound like anything he's done in the last twenty years. And I should have known better after hearing the awful "Airhead Remix" of Silence on Poem.

I hope the Capitol and Nettwerk are giving Bill a decent cut due his unexpected success after all these years. I hate to think about how little he got for the more than 50 of his CDs I've bought so far. The Recording Industry is killing music.

On the brighter side, the two cds do make fine coasters.

Avoid. Don't encourage these people.
Don't reward this kind of marketing.

I still haven't heard one single remix of the Delerium catalogue that deserves any mention at all. To be fair there are one or two versions that are endurable when heard in a continuous DJ mix, but most of them just take a beautiful piece of music and proceed to trash it into some kind of emotionless piece of junk. It is not that I dislike the idea, it is just that these mixes turn out so horribly wrong. I can understand that people coming from the other direction may appreciate the effort, but having enjoyed the originals a lot myself, it is clear that these mixes do not improve on them in any way at all.

Avoid.