Review
Genre and Mood
Hrdvsion reworks Discolight by the Berlin artist Pilocka Krach as a club track with house and disco in its title and techno in its bones. The remix is vibrant and energetic, steady rather than explosive, and immersive in the way long, patient dance tracks are.
Song Summary
Pilocka Krach is an experimental electronic musician based in Berlin, whose own songs are short and playful; her first version of the track, “Discolights”, appeared in 2011 on a 7-inch limited to 100 copies, and the album version on her 2015 Best Of runs under four minutes. In April 2012 the German label Greatest Hits International issued a 12-inch of remixes, with Hrdvsion’s NSD Mix on the A-side beside versions by Hannah Holland, Patric Catani and Acid Pauli. Hrdvsion’s take stretches the track to five minutes and thirty-nine seconds and puts it on a steady club footing.
Musical Breakdown
Intro: Captivating Start
The remix opens with its rhythm, giving a DJ a stable start before the melodic material arrives.
Build-up: Layering the Energy
Percussion and synth lines are added one at a time, so the groove thickens gradually rather than all at once.
Drop: Dancefloor Explosion
When the full arrangement is in place, the track settles into its main groove. The release here is a matter of everything locking together rather than a big festival-style drop.
Bridge: Melodic Exploration
A lighter passage shifts the attention to the synth textures and small variations before the beat returns at full strength.
Climax: Full Energy
The groove comes back with all its layers, the remix at its densest.
Outro: Gradual Fade
Elements are stripped away again until little is left but rhythm, ready for the next record.
Concepts in Focus
This track is a remix in its most traditional form: a 12-inch for DJs with four producers’ readings of one song and no original at all. Hrdvsion’s NSD Mix leads; Hannah Holland’s, Patric Catani’s and Acid Pauli’s follow. Each producer chooses what to keep from the source and what to build around it, and the record as a whole is a small lesson in how differently the same material can be heard.
What makes the NSD Mix a club record is the four-on-the-floor pulse underneath it. Discogs files the 12-inch under techno, tech house and acid, styles that all rest on a kick drum landing on every beat. Listen to how that constant pulse lets the other elements come and go freely: nothing else has to keep time, so everything else can play.
Artistic Context
Hrdvsion, pronounced “hard vision”, is the Canadian composer and producer Nathan Jonson, born in 1980, brother of the techno producer Mathew Jonson and of Holly Jonson. Pilocka Krach works at the experimental edge of electronic music; her Best Of, issued in 2015 by the Berlin label Monika Enterprise with design by The Designers Republic, gathers her own versions, including Discolight.
Cultural Impact
Discolight’s remix 12-inch is a small record from Berlin’s underground rather than a hit, and its life has been in DJ sets and, more recently, on streaming, where the NSD Mix is published as the track embedded here. It is on this playground as an example of how a remix package can carry an experimental artist onto the dancefloor.
