Since their inception a decade and a half ago, Valerian Swing has blazed a singular path perpendicular to genre tropes, touching on styles and moods long enough for a listener to attain familiarity but in fleeting enough fashion that a graceful avoidance of expectation should be the only assumption one can make about a new release of theirs. Shades of a wide variety of genres and sub-genres color their music - post-hardcore, math rock, post-rock, prog, psychedelia, etc - but do little to capture the vibrant intensity conveyed by their songs.

Less obvious though is the steady beating heart of expansive textural elements incorporated into their work. Melody and counterpoint are present even in the most intense and visceral moments of their music, the impact of which is heightened through subtle shadings of tranquil ambient sound design that briefly emerge then disappear, underscoring the music’s graceful fluidity.

Similar to the remixes that Valerian Swing commissioned for the vinyl version of their 2011 album “A Sailor Lost Around The Earth”, the band’s release of a tenth anniversary compilation album in 2018 occasioned further reworkings of their extant material in which one of the most imaginative rock bands in the world finds the textural core of their songs extrapolated into expansive reimaginings.

Anyone expecting the frantic technicality or the dramatic bombast of Valerian Swing’s better-known back catalog might be surprised by the delicacy present in these two songs. Even that lightness, however, contains contrasts sharp enough to retain an element of surprise - Samuel Organ’s take on “Five Walls” floats wistfully on currents of synth texture while Machweo’s remix of “Three Keys” takes a more propulsive route, opting for a buoyant, borderline hyperpop treatment.

Unlike so many remix albums that serve no real artistic purpose, the reworked songs present on both EPs not only unveil an esoteric understanding of the songs, helping subtle components emerge from the cacophony in which they were originally housed and highlighting the band’s compositional versatility, but also act as a unified work. These songs taken as a whole don’t sound like the products of varied artists from different genres holed up in their respective niches - the cohesion present sounds more like a well-crafted DJ mix or a mixtape from a friend with spectacular taste and the diversity of the contributing artists offers a degree of detail towards the panoramic vision of what the band has created over the past fifteen years.