at a glance...

Hometown: Hoboken, NJ
Year Formed: 1984

Personnel:
Ira Kaplan - guitar, keyboards, drums
Georgia Hubley - drums, guitar, keyboards
James McNew - bass, guitar, drums, keyboards
Q Unique, Kit Clayton, and Mobukazu Takemura - remixing

Related Artists :
The Schramms, Dump

Notes:
When Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley founded Yo La Tengo they probably didn't intend to turn into America's best rock band, it just turned out that way. They went through innumerable line-ups before settling on the trio of Kaplan, Hubley, and McNew in 1992, and since then extensive tours and a string of consistently excellent albums have boosted them to the top of the heap.

"Danelectro 1, 2," and "3" are loosely similar instrumentals named after a guitar that Sears sold by the truckful in the '60s. The first version is a brief practice room recording; echoing, stretched sounds from a delay pedal that's having its knobs tweaked wrap loosely around one reverberant guitar lick and a modestly strutting bass line which is echoed by electric piano. Alongside the original is a hip-hop treatment by the Arsonists' DJ Q-Unique, who highlights bits of the pedal sound and pumps things up with some jeep beats.

The other "Danelectros" were recorded in the Nashville studio where Yo La Tengo recorded their last album, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. "2" overlays "1's" bass line with a contrapuntal guitar melody that evokes rural vistas, then "3" suspends part of "2's" guitar tune over a spacious drum pattern. And what do you have? The basis of the wistful heartbreaker "Last Days of Disco" from And Then Nothing..., which also has that original pedal noise buzzing around in the mix.

The other two remixes transform the material even more radically than Q-Unique. Kit Clayton isolates parts of "3's" bass line, takes a sample of the drum part, throws in reversals of samples, then runs them all against each other at disynchronously accelerating tempos until they turn into a vertiginous blur. Nobukazu Takemura's treatment of "2" is even more extreme. It opens with electronically altered voices tumbling out of a hip-hop beat. The tune first arrives a minute in, buoyed by a rhythm program that'd make Mouse On Mars jealous. Takemura adorns the guitar track with keyboards, bells, and sped-up voices, making it into the theme for an imaginary child-oriented TV series. Then five-and-a-half minutes in the Yo La Tengo sounds drop out altogether, replaced by a repetitive Steve Reich-like keyboard line. Takemura then stacks harp flourishes, the original guitar part, and layers of keyboards atop each other for another five minutes of looped trance-induction.