Moby, Jacob Lusk, BLOND:ISH, Kiko Franco - Natural Blues (TECIE) (Live from Way Out West)

I did not expect a 1999 Moby track to be the thing that got me this week, and yet here we are. “Natural Blues” was already one of the great uses of a sample in dance music — that keening Vera Hall field recording, “Oh Lordy, trouble so hard,” lifted off an Alan Lomax tape and dropped into a house track — and this live reworking finds a way to make it hit new. Jacob Lusk from Gabriels takes the vocal that was originally a sample and sings it live, and a gospel-trained voice turns the sorrow in it from a ghostly loop into a person standing right in front of you. BLOND:ISH and Kiko Franco rebuild the track underneath into something warmer and more organic than the original’s clipped electronic bones, all rolling percussion and a bassline that breathes. Hearing it come off a festival stage, you can feel the field around it, the sound spilling out into open air. It’s the rare “legacy track gets a live update” that justifies itself instead of just cashing in on nostalgia. Twenty-six years on, that sample still stops a room cold.

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