Great remixers are great listeners. They understand where a track has come from and work out where it might go next. They have a distinctive aesthetic but not a formula. They have impeccable taste. They never ruin a track, and often improve it beyond measure. They never do it just for the money (though the money surely helps). For all these reasons, great remixers are as rare as Javan rhinos.
This week, two Javan rhinos come along at once. The DFA, aka Tim Goldsworthy and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, made their name producing tight, rigorous punk-funk for Radio 4 and the Rapture, but over the past couple of years they've been loosening up and venturing towards the wilder shores of disco, psychedelia and techno, creating a sticky mindmeld of Can, Chic, Talking Heads and Underworld. Although the groove is still paramount, the emphasis is increasingly on mutation rather than repetition.
This is the period loosely covered by their second volume of remixes, which hums with unexpected eighth-minute epiphanies (Goldfrapp's Slide In) and head-trip finales (Tiga's Far From Home). Their refits are sympathetic yet counterintuitive. Who else could make a disco dancer out of Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor (Hand That Feeds) or turn Pharrell Williams' whiny ass-fetishism into yearning cosmic funk (She Wants to Move)? In last week's Guardian, the Rapture complained about the DFA's punishing perfectionism. No doubt it makes them a bugger to work with, but it also makes them a joy to listen to.
The only thing Kieran "Four Tet" Hebden shares with the DFA is a refusal to do the same thing twice. Depending on the track he's reconfiguring (the roster here includes Bloc Party and Aphex Twin), he sounds like a folkie, a hip-hop-head, a jazz nut or a techno obsessive. As an album, Remixes delights in unexpected juxtapositions: Thom Yorke's neurotic croon next to MF Doom's sternly cerebral raps; impossibly intricate mazes of percussion (on Lars Horntveth's Tics, the beats sound like armour-plated insects burrowing through discarded drum kits) beside shuffling pastoral psychedelia (Beth Orton's Carmella, unfurled into almost 12 minutes of rickety folk-hop).
Hebden's restless imagination doesn't always make for the smoothest ride: Skttrbrain, a version of Radiohead's Scatterbrain, is as knotty and compacted as its spelling. But he gives the listener what all great remixers do: a sense of boundless possibility.
