Drummer Tomas Barfod, who normally taps skins for Scandanavian dance-punk outfit WhoMadeWho, has struck out under his own name.

Barfod has previously flown solo as TomBoy, turning out perky disco and electro on Gomma. His new record, Salton Sea, shows his interest in house music drifting to the fore. As Boiler Room observe, Los Angeles beat-whizz Shlohmo has reworked a track from that album, and it’s an interesting example of what happens when a darker sensibility is brought to bear on spangly source material.

The original is a brittle number: Jeppe Kjellberg’s auto-tuned falsetto twists and turns over two-bit electronics and swelling horns. Schlohmo jettisons the tweeness in favour of something mustier. Kjellberg’s dinky vocals are given the -50% pitch treatment; once bright, Barfod now sounds somnolent, half-woken. Shlohmo’s drum programming – all clicks, snaps and woodblocks – is skittering and busy. The ‘chop’n’screw’ remix approach is hardly the most fiercely innovative creative strategy around these days, but Schlohmo does a fairly good job of extracting a little dread from the po-faced original. All told, it’s a well-judged re-imaginging of Barfod’s track; a reflection cast by a broken glass.

Joseph Morpurgo