Walter Gibbons Jungle Music: Mixed with Love: Essential & Unreleased Remixes 1976-1986 (Strut)

This is an album of disco remixes, which is automatically going to be a fun listen. But in this case, the remixer was not solely concerned with dancefloor utility: Gibbons's remixes are transformative in unexpected ways, and if I were dancing to them, frankly I'd get distracted by their quirks, which are even rhythmically unusual at times. He makes odd aspects stand out starkly, even strangely.

Consider, for instance, what he does with the opening of Bettye LaVette's "Doin' the Best That I Can": it's stripped down to a beat so sonically one-dimensional it sounds like a cheap set of bongos, the little bass allowed fulfills no harmonic function, and her vocal floats above it all in a nearly disassociated way. Eventually more instrumentation kicks in, but then he strips everything back again to slowly build a new climax. He does this over and over for 11 minutes, not stretching out the song's structure as a classic remixer such as Tom Moulton would do, but downright obliterating it. This is like dub techniques applied to disco.

It's no surprise that Stetsasonic reputedly hated Gibbons's remix of "4 Ever My Beat"; he rejected a lot of what artists probably considered to be crucial elements of their songs in favor of a more abstract approach that at times seems to be philosophically questioning the very definition of music. It makes sense that this two-CD compilation includes two remixes of his also innovatively inclined friend Arthur Russell's music (including a previously unreleased version of Dinosaur L's "Go Bang"); one senses in both artists a dissatisfaction with filling a circumscribed role or delivering the expected. Consider yourself warned, or alerted to the surprising delights to be found here. - Steve Holtje

Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer who splits his time between editing Culturecatch.com, working at the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix, and editing cognitive neuroscience books for Oxford University Press. No prizes for guessing which pays best.