Artist: Small Culture
Title: Tide Pools (Splavender Remix)
Label: Unsigned/Self-released
Release Date: April 23, 2017
Collaboration is the glue that holds together local music scenes and Small Culture dazzles with their fascinating new remix of Splavender’s “Tide Pools.”
Jerik Centeno, the guiding hand behind local creative powerhouse Small Culture, lends his production expertise to this reimagining of Splavender’s song “Tide Pools” from their latest release Hallucinations and Hospitalizations. He manages to reinvent the song in a way that brings the best qualities of both Splavender and Small Culture together.
There’s an innate cinematic quality to the remix, like the onset of a hopeful narrative upswing, a brightening wistfulness, punctuated by the high-pitched vocals of Danny Ellis. Jerik has a gift for digging through a song to find the most dramatic elements and place them at the forefront of a song for the greatest possible impact.
His remix lives up to this production ethos, taking “Tide Pools” and shaping it into a glistening dream, with dynamic musical movements that feel both graceful and seamless. Jerik manages to build on the foundation of Splavender’s original composition and make it his own without overshadowing the foundational material.
It helps that Splavender have a knack for crafting songs with an energetic swing, polishing off saxophone solos with high-octave croons, hyper-active guitar weaving itself in and out of the spotlight. With “Tide Pools” Jerik manages to illustrate the strengths of Splavender while exhibiting his immense talent as a producer and songwriter himself.
These are the sorts of partnerships that help to strengthen the San Diego music scene, and in this case, it shows how local artists can work together to create works that serve to open up source material to the realms of creative interpretation.
Catch Splavender and Small Culture at The Holding Company, Thursday April 27th.