REMIXING THE CURE
A long time ago (in a lost world, you could say), we were invited by The Cure to go on tour with them. For months we travelled around Europe and then the United States, our racket of cheap distortion pedals, pirated software and loads of drums bouncing around vast arenas, confusing at least 50% of every audience. 65daysofstatic as a stadium band! Better than it had any right to be. Retreat! Retreat! really benefits from that amount of reverb, you know?
At the Hollywood Bowl, we forgot to plug our show laptop in during soundcheck, so it sat onstage draining its battery and only made it as far as our second song before giving up. Upon dying it crashed our fragile and temperamental soundcard, leading it to decide to gift an already bewildered audience the Hollywood Bowl's first and probably only autonomous, generative, avant-garde glitch and white noise performance at twice the volume we'd been playing at.
After that tour, The Cure asked us to remix four tracks from their then current album 4:13 Dream for its companion EP Hypnogogic States. We dutifully spent weeks obsessing over them, made some really strange noise, and happily handed it all over.
What happened next remains mysterious, but our best, wildly speculative guess is that in the meantime The Cure's record label had been busy hiring bands people had actually heard of, like 30 Seconds to Mars and My Chemical Romance, to do more commerically sensible remixes and it turned out that they didn't actually need or particularly want our odd remixes at all. And so in response to that, in a fantastic and inspirational act of record label antagonism, The Cure smashed all of our remixes into a single 21 minute track called Exploding Head Syndrome and made it the closing song on the EP.
A NEW 65DAYSOFSTATIC REMIX OF THE CURE DAWNS
Sixteen years (!) later, The Cure asked if we'd like to do another remix (just the one this time) and so of course we said yes. Not many bands can get us to participate in the remix industrial complex these days, but this one was a no-brainer and absolute treat. We managed to pick a banger of a song too (All I Ever Am) and we can assure you it was obsessed over just as much as the ones we made a decade and a half ago.
And check out the other contributors! Looking forward to hearing the Ex-Easter Island Head one in particular.
The album is out 13th June on triple vinyl, triple cd and, brilliantly, triple cassette.
It can be pre-ordered now, check this link for more.
