I remember lapping through an infinity pool in 2010. The edge overlooked the Seattle skyline 35 floors up, but the lack of visible safeguards made it feel like you were always three breaststrokes away from your head being abreast of the feeling of cold pavement.  And parts of the pieces of me after the life combustion were floating towards the precipice, but the rest was wading through thoughts of a few years ago. I’d paddled furiously in these same waters, telling a friend of my life plan and the terror of not meeting age deadlines for my goals.  Even then as I lay motionless in the water in my new ’emotionless’ state, even after life met chaos and went ‘Boom!’, I could feel the anxiety of that way of life pulse through me.  The contradiction of these two lives, my lives, created a crater in me I couldn’t be willed out of.

But then Phantogram’s ‘When I’m Small’ came on the radio, and I had my escape plan.  I’d never heard music before slip so casually into its own sadness but still have inherent in it a strength that somewhere, in some future, there’s a way out. It doles out the dolefulness, and its grasping for the light, but it’s not doing it desperately–it’ll happen if it fucking happens. That’s dark indietronica; and that’s why I’ll always pick a song like the Riton remix of  Digitalism’s ‘Wolves’ over the original any day.

Digitalism’s original has all the merits in the world, and for most people its a damn good banger. But I don’t react well to tracks that are supposed to make me feel positive–ironic, considering that anthems are my lifeblood.  But there’s versions of every fist pumper–like Riton’s here—that invert the feelings out of the dancefloor and into the sky , leaving you to dance your body and mind through the pool of thoughts that flood you. And when ‘the wolves come’, and your life ‘disappears into the wind’, the  joy you get from not being lost as you stare down the dangerous edge in front of you, feels so much more worth it. Dark remixes like Riton’s make you earn those feelings in a series of electronic soul battles, but knowing you got there on your own feels like winning a war.

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