Missing the point of each piece in a fan mash-up that provides worrying showcases of just what Spotify is letting onto their servers, Hidden Place into a Forest is as important as it is awful. Beyond sharing producers and a brief mention from Robert Smith of Björk in an interview over a decade ago, the pair at the heart of this piece has hardly worked together. Should they do so it would sound, hopefully, better than this. Hidden Place from Björk and A Forest from The Cure mashed up because the LoungeMaster site, whatever that is, fancied their chances and stuck this out there. Any information on it, confirmed or rumoured, all stems from those strange days of mash-up tracks and previous releases.
Regardless of the intention or primitive desire to stick these two tracks together, its major flaw strikes through far too frequently. Mixed with no presence given to either vocalist or any intention of pitching them and their tracks close to one another, Hidden Place into A Forest, or at least this version, is worryingly short in quality. Stunning it is that a mash-up of two solid tracks can be fumbled so poorly, even after such minimal changes, the mix here is proof that simplicity is difficult to pull off. Hidden Place into A Forest is not a bad concept for a mix. Gordyboy archives of this track and a selection of other wonderful mixes are still, thankfully, available. Digging through the annals of the internet backlog is well worth it if it means getting away from this stifled edition.
Gordyboy deserves as much credit as can be thrown at them. This Is Hardcore Driving is a brilliant mash-up of Pulp’s high-strung, sexualised strings from their 1998 album title track, but Hidden Plane Into a Forest sticks out in that pile of bootlegs. Or at least it must have to someone out there, shamelessly ripping it, lifting it and turning an interesting mash-up into a shoddy copy-and-paste tech-clad replica. Empty of heart and soul but also unchallenging and theft from elsewhere. That makes Hidden Place into A Forest not only a stolen idea but a bungled robbery of a good idea that filters out its thoughtful mix and replaces it with loud percussion and emptied vocal rotations that see the tracks, funnily enough, separated.
Those hoping for an overlap of Smith and Björk are fresh out of luck. Beyond the instrumentals, which are butchered and piped into one another with all the grace of a pigeon racing toward a glass door, there is nothing here to suggest much interest. Gordyboy reigns supreme with an earlier mixture that proves the devil is in the detail. Beyond a good tempo kept firm by the obvious shift in track, Hidden Place into A Forest has nothing going for it beyond the hopeful shot it has of shining a light onto a different, better mix of the same two tracks. Björk and Smith of course have vocal structures and instrumentally strong concepts are their forte. Blurring them together should be a cinch, but for the mysterious entity Lounge Masters, it proves far too difficult a task.
