Fluke has spent two years quietly rebuilding their own catalog and has released the results as The Second Bite, twelve tracks pulled from across the band's history and reconstructed from the ground up. It arrived June 19 through Surface Records in association with !K7 Music, with a limited double gatefold LP following a week later. Jon Fugler, Mike Tournier, and Julian Nugent handled it, the same core that formed on the experimental edge of London acid house and never fully left. The line in the announcement that matters is the least decorated one: regaining control of their original compositions. This is a master's play, and the band said so instead of hiding it behind language about revisiting.
Most re-recordings sound like careful forgeries because that is exactly what they are trying to be. Electronic music makes the problem worse, since the machines and their limits are not the delivery method for those songs, they are a substantial part of what the songs actually are. Modernize that and the thing worth preserving evaporates. The Second Bite escapes it on one detail: Fluke never sold anything. The band describe the process as a voyage into the dusty end of the lock-up, which means the samplers and synthesizers that made Atom Bomb, Groovy Feeling, and Absurd are the same ones that made these versions. New arrangements, new production decisions, same physical voices. Additive rather than substitutional, which is the whole difference.
The catalog being rebuilt is larger than the band's name recognition suggests. Fluke productions ran through The Matrix Reloaded and Sin City, and more consequentially for anyone under forty, through games. Wipeout 2097 carried original Fluke material alongside The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, The Prodigy, and Underworld, functioning as an electronic music education for a generation who encountered it as the sound of going very fast. Need for Speed: Underground put them in front of millions more. In the nineties they were the act invited to remix Björk, New Order, Talk Talk, and The Rolling Stones, which is not a list anyone assembles by accident. A great many people know this music intimately and could not name the group.
Nobody needs this record, and that is worth saying plainly. The originals exist and sound good. Catalog control is now one of the few reliable ways for artists of this generation to earn from work they already made; the volume of these projects is going to increase, and most will be worse than this one. What separates The Second Bite is that the method is right rather than merely legal. The double gatefold is the format worth owning. Start with the digital, put Slid on first, and hear whether twenty years of distance did the songs any favors.
The Second Bite is out now on Surface Records in association with !K7 Music.
