- I don’t think I paid enough attention to The Townhouses (aka Leigh Hannah) when he put out his debut full-length, late last year. Despite, at the time, self-identifying (on his Bandcamp page) with a genre that has without a doubt collapsed under the weight of the public gaze on its internal meaninglessness (I’m talking about chillwave, but shh! Not so loud!), it was a sweetly lilting album that easily achieved the cw benchmark: it was summer magic. Angelic, nearly inaudible vocals floated with the lightest touch of soul, over a mixture of wonky, electronic beats and a great variety of live percussion, gently grooving away.

The bandcamp tags for this modest remix ep, suggest - slightly more accurately - ‘ambient, electronic, gamelan, Melbourne pop, er, Sydney’. The last, I guess, being a nod to some of the stellar line-up of producers who’ve got their hands on the tunes from Diaspora. These include electronic art-rock-pop veteran oddity Pikelet, auspicious art-jangle-pop newbies Milk Teddy (with a member of The Ancients), tuneful electronic noodler Outerwaves (so Brisbane should have got a nod too, hmph), frenetic, wonky beat-meister from the This Thing collective Electric Sea Spider and an unknown, fifteen-year-old bedroom producer that Townhouses bumped into, here posing as Japanese Wallpaper.

Milk Teddy and Moon DDice transform the gentle electro-funk of Tokyo into an upbeat but strange psych-pop jam, completed by a lovers’ quarrel between robots. Odd but effective, just like Milk Teddy. Pikelet, fills her version of the album’s title track to the brim with a bewildering array of loops. It nearly splits at the seams, but somehow waddles on to its destination.

Outerwaves' mix of Talk is one of the truest to the source material, ever-so-slightly emphasising the synthetic elements in what amounts to a trap version. Japanese Wallpaper is similarly easy-going, having another go at the title track, shoving down all the bits that stuck out in the mix, till everything is about as smooth and sweet as apple sauce. Electric Sea Spider’s contribution is typically insane, jumping about polyrhythmically, like, well, a spider on some acid-meth cocktail. It’s almost certainly the most original effort of the lot and despite being about as disconcerting as, well, a spider on an acid-meth cocktail, probably should have been stuck somewhere in the middle of this, rather than tacked on at the end, like some crazy old drunk, hiding out behind the nightclub.

This collection of remixes is, unsurprisingly, much less seamless than the album from which it was struck and having tipped the foremost arty, electronic fiddlers in Oz to have a go, has yielded results ever-so-slightly less exciting than the best remix albums. There’s still plenty to enjoy though, both in terms of originality and just plain, old-fashioned, listening enjoyment.

- Chris Cobcroft.