Can I just say something kids? I fucking hate remix records. This hatred is totally irrational, unbased, and quite possibly shows me off to be a philistine on 1990s music. Yet, there it is. This is not to say that I don't like the music produced on remix records. In fact, some very interesting pieces have resulted from the remix treatment, and there is something to be said for the implicitly collaborative nature of the concept. But if there's one thing that makes my sphincter tighten, it's buying a record, and then buying a remixed version that has maybe one or two really great, innovative pieces and a whole bunch of lifeless filler. Which, sadly, is all too often the case.

The main problem with most remix treatments is that producers have a habit of using the source treatment as just another sound effect to be inserted in their pre-conceived notion. Japanese drumming fanatics Kodo have had this done to them for years, without any compensation. House, jungle, and drum-n-bass DJs have brazenly sampled their thick, rich drum sound for their boom- boom- chitty- boom- boom purposes. Perhaps out of a sense of camaraderie or a willingness to catch in, here comes the inevitable remix project, Sai-So. But despite my rage against the concept, there's one good thing about Sai-so: the original source is finally being recognized.

Some of the treatments offered here are genuinely interesting pieces that take the polyrhythmic complexity of Kodo's work to heart. Japanese producer extraordinary, Satori, opens the album with a piece that takes an existing Kodo rhthym and adjusts it slightly as a bouncy house number. Bill Laswell (who produced Kodo's 1997 release, Ibuki) fathoms a truly unsettling piece that mixes slight ambient structures around a propulsive beat, before adding his patented bass lines to the mix.

But some of the producers just didn't try hard enough. Kevin Yost's Deep & Ethnic mix sounds like Kevin Yost's dumb-ass chump brand of house music with a "breakdown" thrown in the middle like so much tossed ham fat. And equally as bad is Kasx/Beas' Wax On mix, which sounds like a third- rate Chemical Brothers.

Should you buy this record? I don't know. I got this for free and I may listen to it a couple of more times and end up finding out it's sorta okay. I'm not complaining. You on the other hand... Well, I don't know you, now do I?

-Samir Khan