Minnesota @ Club Red

If you've seen the recent documentary Re:Generation, you're probably aware of the current trend of reconfiguring rock, pop, and other music forms by spicing 'em up with various electronica elements. But as any chef will tell you, sometimes the whole doesn't wind up tastier than the sum of its ingredients. Take the popular practice of dubstep artists' remixing the bombastic bass-infused EDM genre into every song imaginable, whether it's '80s cartoon theme songs (Inspector Gadget, Transformers) or pop and rock standards of the past. YouTube and SoundCloud are littered with hundreds of tracks that blend subharmonic wub-wub into Frank Sinatra's "I Won't Dance" or The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby," often with mixed results. When producer Christian Bauhofer (also known by his stage name Minnesota) remixed The Mamas and the Papas single "California Dreamin'" last year, however, what resulted was a superior track. Unlike, say, Cragga's bass-y remix of the Marvelettes' 1961 hit "Please Mr. Postman," Bauhofer's dubstep tweakings mesh with the languid moodiness of the source material. It's just one way in which the Santa Cruz-based artist's work ranks above his more brostep-inclined brethren, as Bauhofer's more interested in ambiently indolent dubscapes filled with subtlety, more in line with the EDM genre's roots than creating the sort of adrenaline-soaked groans, grinds, and killer drops heard in the works of 12th Planet and his ilk.