Paul Woolford’s hardcore and rave-indebted Special Request project continues its industrious hot streak, delivering two sublime, peak-time reworks of Erol Alkan’s unstoppable ‘Spectrum’. Since its release in late 2018, Alkan’s hit has been as ubiquitous as Woolford himself, gaining momentum as a staple in the sets of DJs such as Andrew Weatherall, Sven Vath and Mano Le Tough.
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Beginning with the ‘Kaleidoscopic Mix’, SR strips back the high-energy reverie of Alkan’s original into something truly vast, building to an unmistakable and flawless acid bassline, from which emerge a brooding and dystopian network of melodies. Balancing tension and melancholy without ever losing grip of its enormous bass weight, the ‘Kaleidoscopic Mix’ delivers ten-minutes of compelling euphoria.
On the flip, the ‘Double Vision’ mix takes much of the same structure but places Spectrum’s original, glorious riff front-and-centre once more, as if stretching it's fizzy, inherent energy out of a warehouse and towards the fields at sunrise.