Three words to stir the spirits: Laurel, Halo and remix.

As elucidated in our recent list of our favourite contemporary remixers, the Ann Arbor producer knows how to sound out a track’s hidden reserves. For a masterclass, see Halo’s heartstopping of Kuedo’s ‘Work, Live & Sleep In Collapsing Space’ – a weightless cosmic hymn, and one of our Top 10 tracks of last year.

Halo pulls a similar trick on her edit of John Cale’s ‘Living With You’, taken from 2012’s Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood. The original was a scuzzy ode to domestic harmony, swathed in MBV-grade fuzz and underpinned by a flamenco rhythm. Halo’s take couldn’t be more different, with Cale excised from the track entirely. Her reading offers an elegant synthesis of acoustic piano and mussed electronics, and sounds something like Ryuichi Sakamoto duetting with a waterlogged arcade cabinet. When it comes to making machines live and breathe, Halo is still half a league ahead of the pack. [via Dummy]