Somewhere a teenager who has never heard the original is about to lose their mind to a riff written before they were born, and that is the best thing about Lilly Palmer’s Komodo. The original is Mauro Picotto’s, a 2000 trance monster whose snaking lead line is burned into the memory of anyone who went near a club that decade, and Palmer hauls it out of the trance era and straight into peak-time techno. That migration is the entire move. The famous melody stays mostly intact while everything around it gets harder, faster and more mechanical, the euphoria of the old version traded for the relentless forward pressure of a modern techno floor. Palmer built her reputation on exactly this kind of no-nonsense set weapon, and Komodo is a layup for her, a guaranteed moment handed to any DJ who drops it. Reworking something this iconic usually ends badly, the remixer sanding off the one thing that made it matter, but she dodges that by trusting the riff to carry itself. It does. Twenty-five years on, that lead still cuts through a room like nothing else from its era. Old enough to vote and it still empties the bar onto the floor.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.