All you need is Beatle remixes

Just when you thought the Beatles’ music could not be repackaged in any new or interesting way (save for the many "greatest hits" reissues that Capitol and EMI seem determined to wave under the public’s noses every year or so), out comes Love: a reimagining of the Beatles original recordings. The music was assembled to coincide with a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, but never mind that. The promising development here is the involvement of both original Beatle producer George Martin and his son Giles.

The two were allowed free reign over the Beatles’ master catalogue, a coup that allowed them to plunder demo recordings and early takes, and granted them special wizard-like powers to strip away tracks, highlight vocals, reverse and layer sounds, and generally play around with the controls like, well, the Beatles themselves.

This playfulness cannot be underestimated. It was the collective playful energy of John, Paul, George and Ringo that allowed the Beatles’ one-of-a-kind body of work to exist in the first place. Their love of British radio shows and goofy sound effects (Peter Sellers’ "Goon Show" was a particular influence on both John and Paul) led the songwriting team to experiment with every track, most notably during 1966’s "Revolver" up through the band’s penultimate 1969 release, "Abbey Road."

With every song an opportunity to make a brand-new sonic imprint on the world, the Beatles became masters of sound. Their recordings – even on limited four-track equipment from the 1960s – were models of dynamic balance, with loud guitars offset by stacked harmonies, delicate acoustic picking punctuated by George Martin’s string arrangements, hoofbeats mixing with handclaps. They used the four-track studio like a four-headed maestro.

So it’s interesting to see what George and son have managed to do with these vaulted masters. The glorious part is how fresh the new takes on Love sound. In the age of DJ remixes, one could easily go way over the top with sampled Beatle bits, but the Martins have chosen to group the songs, sculpting them, and building up thematic tension and release. Trying for something symphonic, at times, as with George Martin’s string arrangement gracing George Harrison’s demo recording of While My Guitar Gently Weeps; stripping away the sonic layers to get to the elemental truth of Paul McCartney’s hollers on Hey Jude.

Love starts off, appropriately, with a cappella singing: the three voices melding into "Abbey Road"’s lush Because is rather like the world being created on the first day: And then there was light… and it was good. (In the absence of Cirque de Soleil antics, you may choose to supply your own visual or mental accompaniment. )

Next comes a mash-up of the opening 12-string chord from A Hard Day’s Night, joined by the galloping drum solo from The End, segueing into Get Back amid some ascending orchestral notes from A Day in the Life.

The fun here comes from knowing that, like hip-hop pioneer DJ Shadow, who sculpted his entire first album from samples, the producers have limited themselves to Beatle tapes. It’s still a radical, hip-hop move, cutting and pasting old sounds into new. It has surely not escaped the Martins’ attention that groups like The Chemical Brothers have found fresh inspiration for slamming tracks like Setting Sun from the truly groundbreaking 1966 recording, Tomorrow Never Knows.

Tomorrow Never Knows deserves special mention, because its use of overpowering bass and drums, tape loops, psychedelic sitars and a droning single chord seems to have prefigured drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, techno, ambient groove and about a dozen other dance music innovations. Largely fueled by McCartney’s avant-garde leanings and Lennon’s hallucinations, it was a watershed recording that continues to thrill and inspire.

On Love, son Giles has the sound intuition to mix together Tomorrow Never Knows with the tabla-and-sitar swirl of George Harrison’s Within You, Without You. What results is a dynamic new remix – just the sort of thing you might hear on London’s club floors these days.

Ingenious grafts come about through lucky accident: similar tempos allow the melding of Drive My Car, The Word, What You’re Doing and bits from Good Morning, Good Morning (though on that track, the maelstrom of layers gets a bit out of hand). Similar musical keys allow seamless segues from a backwards Sun King to George Harrison’s Something.

On Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite – the one song that seems to directly tie in to the circus atmosphere of Vegas – the waltz time signature is a nice opportunity to work in the ascending chaos of Lennon’s I Want You (She’s So Heavy), topped with manic McCartney shouts from Helter Skelter. It makes you wonder if the Martins were ingesting any chemicals themselves while doing the remix.

On Strawberry Fields Forever, we take a journey from Lennon’s early demo of the song through its symphonic embellishment – along the way, grafting in baroque bits from Penny Lane, Hello Goodbye, Piggies and every Beatle song that ever seemed touched by Bach’s "Brandenburg Concertos."

Beatle eras seem convenient mashing points, as well. Lady Madonna’s piano runs overlap nicely with Hey Bulldog, from a time in 1968 when the Beatles may have been running a bit less than red-hot with inspiration. It’s great, though, to hear Harrison’s songs shine so brightly on this compilation, especially the lush Indian raga arrangement wrapped around his underrated The Inner Light (also from 1968).

A slight disappointment comes when we encounter songs that have grown too familiar, or have not been sufficiently diddled with, such as Help or Eleanor Rigby. In this environment, only radical reinvention will do. However, one could argue that certain songs – like Yesterday – work best unadorned, in all their simple, original excellence.

This is snack food for Beatle fans, of course. We know we’ll never get another new recording from the Fab Four, so we subsist on fresh glimpses and peeks into the working process of a band that was, arguably, the most important innovation in 20th-century music. The Beatles’ reliance on and reinvention of the recording studio showed thousands of musicians a thousand and one new ways of thinking about music. Love is just one more attempt to show how true this remains today.