Review
Genre and Mood
Wamdue Project and Roy Malone’s King Of My Castle - Roy Malone’s King Mix, as the yearbook names it, is the house version of a song that began life as downtempo. Groovy, because this mix was made for the clubs that carried it around the world in 1999; introspective, because its lyric is about not being in control of your own mind.
Song Summary
King of My Castle is a song by the Atlanta producer Chris Brann under his Wamdue Project alias, sung by Gaelle Adisson. Strictly Rhythm released it on 24 May 1997, and it appeared on the album Program Yourself. Brann had made it as a downtempo track. It became a worldwide club hit two years later, when the Italian house producer Roy Malone, real name Mauro Ferrucci, remixed it, and this King Mix is that remix in full.
Musical Breakdown
Main Section
No review we found walks through the King Mix part by part, so this page describes less than usual. The sources give its two pillars: Adisson’s sung lyric, kept from the original, and the house form Malone built under it in place of Brann’s downtempo setting. Listen for how the song carries over into a club groove.
Concepts in Focus
A remix reworks a recording into a new version, and here the remix is the hit. Brann’s original was a downtempo song; Malone’s house version topped the UK singles chart, the UK dance chart and the US Dance Club Songs chart, reached the top ten in at least twelve other countries and sold, by Wikipedia’s count, about two million copies.
That success spread across releases, each with its own alternate version. The US 12-inch carried the King Mix at 4:56 alongside the Armins Gimmick dub and two Bini & Martini mixes; the UK CD opened with a radio edit of the King Mix at 3:25 and kept the original radio edit at the end. The yearbook’s copy is the full King Mix.
The song had two music video clips. One is made of footage from the 1995 anime film Ghost in the Shell, in which people with cyborg implants are controlled by a hacker called the puppetmaster, a picture of the lyric’s idea: Wikipedia traces the title to Freud’s theory that the ego is not master in its own house.
Artistic Context
Chris Brann was born in Atlanta and is best known as Wamdue Project and Ananda Project; he also records as P’Taah and was one third of Wamdue Kids with Deep C and Chris Udoh until 2000. His music is rooted in house but reaches into deep house, downtempo, techno and drum and bass. In the United Kingdom the 1999 release came out on AM:PM Records on 15 November 1999.
Impact and Reception
The King Mix made King of My Castle a dance standard: a 2009 version with new mixes returned to the Dutch Top 40, and the hook lives on in later house records such as DJ S.K.T – Must Be A Reason (Radio Edit). It is one of the owner’s songs of both 2018 and 2019. Turn it up and ask who rules your castle.
