Les Artistes

It was April when our heroes found themselves on a dusty road to nowhere, caught within the brutal traction-less air of desert dying. Abandonded carcasses of wagons filled the expanse of the cactus ridden plain, and even mirages were nowhere to be found. Without cell phones, transportation or connection to the outside world, our heroes had but one glimpse of the perfection that was their past lives, a fully charged ipod loaded with just one song: XXXChange’s remix of Santogold’s Les Artistes.

The drums gave the pair the power to move their feet, the ambient voices the spiritual resolve to journey forward. As the last battery light flickered off, they found themselves clawing up a sand dune to the foot of a Dream Merchant, white tents shining in the glimmering twilight of another sunset in the desert. The merchant himself was a bartering man, wizened and hardened in both mind and body by a life of negotiating with desert refugees. Amazed at how the pair before his eyes had made it through the expanse of Manzanita and Sahuaro, he offered them drink and a nights sleep in Studio B, a back tent with an M-Box and old Macintosh. And so the Silver and Gold remix of Les Artistes was born. The pair bartered the track for a set of camels and resumed their treck through the wasteland towards whatever future awaited them.