RE:VERSAL 005 with remixes by Villalobos and Jeff Mills
Standfirst: Universal’s vinyl-only series returns on 23 October 2026 with a fifth volume centred on Ricardo Villalobos’ fourteen-and-a-half-minute remix of Beck and the unprecedented meeting of Jeff Mills and Tony Allen, alongside Katy B produced by Four Tet and Floating Points.
There is a simple idea behind Universal’s RE:VERSAL series: take some of the hidden gems in the major’s catalogue and bring them back to vinyl, perhaps with remixes that change their perspective. With the fifth volume, out on 23 October 2026, that formula reaches its deepest and most ambitious point yet. The result is a compilation that does not merely dust off classics, but puts them back into circulation with a thoroughly contemporary urgency.
The title of this chapter is almost inevitable, because the standout is precisely Ricardo Villalobos’ remix of Beck’s “Cellphone’s Dead”. The Chilean producer delivers a fourteen-and-a-half-minute version that, as the label itself writes, is “distinct thanks to a surprising array of playful drums and sound design that only Villalobos knows how to create”. It is not a simple edit: it is a journey through the maximalist minimalism that has made Villalobos a cult figure, a piece that turns Beck’s voice into a rhythmic fragment amid nocturnal sounds and hypnotic grooves.
The AA side opens with a collaboration that feels like a small editorial miracle: Katy B on vocals, with Four Tet and Floating Points on production. “Calm Down” is described as a “heavy-bottomed tech-house banger, with a hint of guilty pleasure”. It is the kind of track that unites the British singer’s pop sensibility with the rhythmic precision of two of the most refined producers on the electronic scene, and confirms just how much the RE:VERSAL series is not only looking at the past, but trying to build bridges.
Then comes the moment that alone justifies buying the record: Jeff Mills and Tony Allen together. The Detroit techno pioneer and the legendary afrobeat drummer, who died in 2020, meet on “Locked And Loaded”, a deep and dark jam built on layers of intricate and varied percussion. It is afrobeat meeting Detroit, a dialogue between two rhythmic languages that changed the history of black music, and here they find a point of synthesis that is as unexpected as it is natural.
To close, Villalobos returns alongside Max Loderbauer, from the jazz and experimental world, for “Recat”. The track is built on original acoustic recordings, reworked with a “serene delicacy”. Juno describes it as a “whispered minimal tech-jazz” that incorporates elements of old ECM jazz releases, and it is perhaps the quietest and most introspective moment on a record that continually shifts registers without ever losing coherence.
RE:VERSAL 005 is available in a limited edition on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl. The series, launched in 2025 with a first volume bringing together Soul II Soul, The Orb and Future Sound of London, confirms itself as one of the most interesting reissue projects of the moment: not a simple exercise in nostalgia, but a way of making archives and contemporary sensibilities converse. With this fifth chapter, the label raises the bar even further and demonstrates that depth is not a question of release year, but of listening.
