Reviewed: Kraak & Smaak – ‘Velvet Seas Remixed’
A remix album can easily become a collection of unrelated club versions, particularly when the original record has as much personality as Kraak & Smaak’s ‘Velvet Seas’. Here, the Dutch trio have assembled producers who understand the record’s foundations in funk, soul and analogue warmth, even when their interpretations take it somewhere entirely different.
The result is a companion piece that gives the album’s songs new dancefloor lives without reducing them to interchangeable DJ tools.
Yuksek sets the tone with a bright, tropical reworking of Kosta G’s contribution, replacing the original’s hazy West Coast ease with springy bass and percussion informed by French touch and Italo disco. Diogo Strausz follows a similarly expansive instinct, drawing on Brazilian disco-funk traditions with congas and circling synths that amplify the source material’s orchestral character.
Anoraak takes a more measured approach. His treatment of Butter Bath’s vocal preserves its understated appeal while stretching the surrounding groove into a darker, more spacious disco arrangement.
The collection’s emotional centre belongs to Ray Mang’s extended version of ‘Velvet Seas’. Izo FitzRoy’s gospel-rooted vocal remains the focal point, but the additional percussion and dubby disco movement give it a different sense of scale. Rather than simply making the original longer, the arrangement creates more room for its emotional peaks to land.
Harvey Sutherland’s ‘Real Love’ heads in the opposite direction, stripping away much of the cosmic soul atmosphere to concentrate on repeating bass, tight loops and a circling synth line. It is one of the clearest examples of how a remix can change a track’s purpose without losing its identity.
Stirmouth brings ‘Heat’ into a dustier, swung groove, while Sound Support close with a punchier take on ‘Travel Light’, bringing analogue brightness and early-house energy to its orchestral foundations.
What holds ‘Velvet Seas Remixed’ together is the care taken with the original material. These producers are not competing to make the biggest track. They are finding different possibilities within songs that already had something worth preserving.
For Kraak & Smaak, it is a reminder that a strong album can support several musical lives. ‘Velvet Seas’ was already a meeting point between Californian warmth, European disco and electronic soul. Its remixes make those connections more explicit, and give DJs considerably more room to explore them.
