Conversing Between D and F

Soulwax put on one of the best live electronic shows I’ve ever seen in September 2024, and, wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t take a single photo or video. That’s how engrossed I was! They had this incredible custom rig where all their synths and buttons and I-literally-could-not-tell-what-else, but they lit up like beacons. 

I loved their 2025 album, All Systems Are Lying. I listened to it a lot. Belgian brothers David and Stephen Dewaele are still creating relevant, creative, original music—continuously since 1995. Their earliest albums, much more punk-aligned than their electronic-forward recent music, are just as good. Everything they do still is informed by that punk ethos and sound. But they hit a sweet spot that not only transformed their own sound, but transformed electronic music forever, in the mid-2000s. Any Minute Now is one of those albums that sneaks up on you, both in how excellent it is, and how influential it has been. If you listen to as much electronic and dance music as I do, you end up hearing Soulwax’s influence everywhere. 

Electroclash had already hit its peak by the time Any Minute Now came out in 2004. Any Minute Now is barely a dance album at all; it sounds much closer to an alt-rock album with a lot of synth and drum machines. The opening song on the album, “E Talking,” is a classic in the truest sense of the word. Merely titling a song “E Talking,” as in, “I didn’t mean what I said like that; it’s because I took MDMA and lost my inhibitions,” is pretty ballsy. It never would have flown on U.S. radio. The album version of “E Talking” heavily samples Lords of Acid’s “Scrood bi U” from their 2001 album Farstucker. I adore Lords of Acid, but Soulwax’s version of this particular song is vastly superior. It just rocks so hard. It’s a rare song that you can both dance to in a club and headbang at the same time.

The music video to “E Talking” is legendary. It definitely takes inspiration from the Prodigy’s video for “Smack My Bitch Up” but makes the concept all its own. Filmed at the Fabric nightclub in London, it presents a literal alphabet of drugs being used by club attendees that night. The concept is wild, but watching it is way better. It gave a profile to this song, the album it’s on, and Soulwax as a whole that they may never have found otherwise. In the U.S., the video was only played super late night for reasons that will become obvious.

But Soulwax didn’t stop there. On the “E Talking” EP, they released several remixes, including a remix by themselves called “E Talking (Soulwax Nite Version).” The Nite Version was so good that they ended up recording an entirely new album called Nite Versions in 2005, comprised mostly of the same songs from Any Minute Now, but radically transformed. Nite Versions was a watershed moment in electronic music, as it took a very solid rock album and turned it into a dance floor classic. The Nite Versions version of “E Talking,” however, features the vocals of Nancy Whang from LCD Soundsystem. The two versions have some things in common, but, really, it’s like listening to two entirely different songs. 

Why not go for round three? Canadian electro star Tiga re-re-recorded the vocals for “E Talking” on his own remix, dubbed the “Tiga’s Disco Drama Remix.” They had already changed the entire song between the two previous versions, so why not transform it entirely again? That’s exactly what happened here. The Tiga version is a more classic club remix. And it’s good. The vocals are slowed down while the beat is sped up. Tiga’s secret to success always was that he has a great singing voice. But he knows how to make people dance, too. 

I can’t name a lot of other songs with three entirely different, equally excellent versions made of it by the same band. These two remixes go beyond the classic definition of a remix and radicalize the entire song from the ground up. Any of the three versions would still pack a dance floor more than 20 years later. 

Soulwax has long had the best musical taste in the industry. Their mixed compilation remix albums “Radio Soulwax” are legendary, primarily under their moniker 2manydjs. They’ve remixed countless other artists, and their remixes are always an event and something to look forward to. Ultimately, they have remixed most notable electronic bands, alt-rock bands, and a slick selection of singer-songwriters, along with some hand-picked classics like Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Their remixes are so respected that them remixing a song often raises the awareness of the underlying material, like in the instance of Wet Leg’s “Too Late Now,” Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “Deadly Valentine,” and Klaxons’ “Gravity’s Rainbow.” They also run their own record label, Deewee, host of musicians including Marie Davidson, Charlotte Adigéry, and Bolis Pupul, each of whom is worth your attention, too.

But “E Talking” is still my favorite song of theirs. Which version is my favorite? I genuinely don’t know. Enjoy all three, just to be certain.