Last October we celebrated five years of Skrillex’s game-changing Grammy-winning EP Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites.
It would be rude not to do the same with the follow up EP More Monsters & Sprites. Released exactly five years ago on Tuesday, it ensured the hype momentum Skrillex had lit eight months before and continued to set the foundations of his boundary-burning attitude right from the off….
While the new originals First Of The Year and Ruffneck were 911-dailing skank-happy dubstep bangers (setting the scene for Bangarang perfectly), the additional remixes of Scary Monsters really showed where Skrillex was heading with his own creative vision and what OWSLA would become when he launched it two months later in August 2011.
Adding to the version legacy of Noisa and Zedd, he recruited the seemingly disparate skills of house headliner Kaskade, the future garage subversion of underground Italian garage head Phonat and the all-out attitude of Dirtyphonics. In hindsight this remix package was much more of future-proofing statement than we ever imagined.
We copped Ruffneck (Full Flex) and the Dirtyphonics remix. We spoke to Dirtyphonics about how the remix came to be a while back… Proper last chance saloon business.
“This offer came through one night, we were all in the studio working on some songs and he called us out of the blue and asked us if we were game to remix Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites. We obviously said yes right away. He sent the stems within the hour after the phone call! We actually said yes without thinking too much about what we’d do. Then after hanging up the phone we realised that it had already been remixed in lots of different genres by the likes of Zedd, Noisia and Kaskade. It took us a minute to figure out how we’d do something that wasn’t already done.
“Plus another challenge was that we only had 48 hours to deliver the remix! We bought a lot of munchies and studio essentials and locked ourselves in the studio for whole 48 hours and worked straight through. We worked on it faster than any of our other songs and remixes and by the 47th hour we were still fixing lots of things. 10 minutes before the deadline we were finally bouncing the last version of the remix you all now know today!
“We’re really pleased to say he loved it right away! He didn’t ask for any changes. To this day we still play it – especially our own DIRTY edit that starts at 140 bpm and rises to 175 – and the crowd still go crazy. It still has a special energy that affects them! Four years later we’re still very proud of it. It remains one of our most famous works and the remix came to life so fast and naturally that we’d probably do the same thing if the same call landed again. We created a monster!”
Here’s the monster right here, plus Ruffneck… Just because. Enjoy!
