Yoko Ono

Wouldnit (I’m a Star) - The Remixes

MIND TRAIN / TWISTED

Released: Monday 6 September 2010

Ever since the edgy mutant disco sound of 1980's 'Walking on Thin Ice' (the last record John Lennon worked on, pop fact fans), Ono has maintained a healthy relationship with dance music, from leftfield electronica to the more 'club banger' end of the spectrum. This release, which collects remixes of the swinging jazz song 'Wouldnit (I'm a Star)' from her 2001 album Blueprint for a Sunrise, definitely tends toward the latter, and as such isn't quite the kind of thing Soundblab would normally cover.

However, this is Yoko Ono we're talking about, an artist who brings a magician's hat brimming with subversion to every project she's involved with, so it's worth a little attention. The slightly predictable house sounds of, say, the 'Emjae Club Mix' are intriguingly skewed by Ono intoning in a deadpan voice "Honey, I take sugar - two." As always with her dance dabblings, it's compelling to hear the results of Ono's avant-garde persona being squeezed into such an apparently counter-intuitive sonic space and heartening to hear how, in her own inimitable style, she makes such a space utterly hers.

The best of the bunch is the excellent 'Richard Morel Vox Mix', on which Ono dukes it out with a heavily autotuned ghost of herself over some nice, swirling, Orb-esque ambient house. Let's be honest, however - this release is only a must-have for Ono completists (there are more of them than you might think) and house DJs with eclectic taste looking to bring a little edge to their set.