Kris Baha’s reworking of Fenice by Le Brame operates as both archaeology and prophecy. Beneath the synthetic gleam lies a political grammar: music as coded resistance to conformity, rhythm as revolt against the quiet tyranny of algorithmic life. The remix retrieves the exuberance of Europe’s 1980s industrial underground and welds it to the nervous pulse of early-2000s counter-culture. Its economy is one of friction: pleasure and control, nostalgia and velocity, collapse and renewal.
Le Brame’s original version, itself a bridge between Italy’s post-wave heritage and contemporary dream-pop, bears the marks of a society that once believed in futurism as progress. Baha, stationed in Berlin, the perpetual workshop of mechanized emotion, treats that optimism as material. He folds it into the architecture of the modern club, where light, repetition, and distortion enact both escape and critique. The listener becomes a worker again, caught in the loop but aware of the machine.
This conversation between artists is less collaboration than dialectic. Federico Piegaja (Le Brame) writes from the lineage of Battiato and Litfiba, melodic yet austere; Baha answers from the lineage of DAF, Front 242, and Nine Inch Nails – bodies politic in motion. The exchange maps the continuum of electronic rebellion, from analogue dissent to digital dissent, from the radio to the rave. It hints at the strange persistence of European idealism: even in decline, it dreams of renewal.
That the remix should appear first on Bandcamp is fitting. The platform, a rare enclave of independent distribution, embodies the same tension: commodified art surviving within the framework of late capitalism, while gesturing toward autonomy. In this context, Fenice – “phoenix” in Italian – becomes allegory. Every cycle of cultural control produces its counter-rhythm. Every empire of noise gives rise to a brief song of refusal.
Baha’s version recalls the basement clubs where policy met pulse, and where the future, however faint, was still audible through distortion. If Universi Paralleli was La Brame’s meditation on alternate worlds, this remix is a dispatch from one of them: an imagined Europe where the machines hum in harmony, but no one forgets who built them.
Listen to Fenice (Kris Baha Remix) below and order the single here.
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