Many dance floor-oriented electronic pieces of music have made it easy to stereotype electronica as emotionless, but Telefon Tel Aviv recordings demonstrate the wrongness of that assumption. The closest thing here to an emotionless piece is “Even Deeper,” a Nine Inch Nails remix and one of New Orleanians (now in Chicago) Joshua Eustis and Charlie Cooper’s first works under the TTA name. It sounds a bit like there’s music going on two backyards’ away, but you’re stuck in yours surrounded by crickets. Their love of electronic click textures never goes away, but the ticks and squitches are never as omnipresent again on this collection.

 

There’s a strong undercurrent of melancholy on these remixes, even when the original track was as warm and sunny as Bebel Gilberto’s “All Around.” Rather than surround her voice with more bzzzzes and clicks, they lay a nylon string guitar next to it plucking a simple, circular melody as strings swell and recede and percussion hits and echoes away, dub-style.

 

The high point is TTA’s radical reimagining of Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” for Impulsive! an album of remixes of classic Impulse recordings. The album sparked a lot of controversy among jazz purists who saw these tracks as stealing from the label’s defining artists, and Telefon Tel Aviv’s version replacing almost everything in Nelson’s track with parts played by the Loyola University Chamber Orchestra particularly came under fire. The ethics of the track aside, the result is beautiful and sweeping, with just enough electronically distressed treatments to keep the piece from sounding purely symphonic. When much of the rest of that album looped parts and provided contemporary beats, Eustis and Cooper left the piece almost perversely percussion-less.

 

2004’s Map of What is Effortless is the best place to discover the ambition and beauty of Telefon Tel Aviv’s music, but the group has developed such a distinctive sound—even amid the laptop bzzz and click brigade—that Remixes Compiled holds together as a coherent listening experience on its own that doesn’t require knowledge of the original tracks to make sense.