This is a late-90s white label compilation that treats 80s radio pop like raw material for a warehouse party. The remixes are lean, aggressive, and age better than most of the originals. Put it on when you want to hear what happens when nostalgia gets a proper drum machine.
Some records sit in the crate for years before they tell you what they really are. I picked this one up at a record fair in Brighton around 2001—double CD in a digipack so generic it could have been sold at a gas station. The sticker said “80’s Hits Remixed” and the cover was a neon silhouette that looked like it was generated on someone’s home computer. I bought it because it was cheap and I was a sucker for the premise: strip the 80s of its gated reverb and turn it into something you could play after midnight.
I must have spun it three times in twenty years. It was background music for cleaning the flat, or something to throw on when friends wanted to hear what a “weird” record collector had in his bag. But last week I pulled it out again, and this time I sat down with a proper setup and no distractions. The album I thought I owned was not the one I was hearing.
The opening track is a remix of “Billie Jean” that doesn’t bother with the original bassline for the first ninety seconds. Instead, it lets a chopped-up vocal phrase float over a 909 kick that’s been pushed just past the point of clean reproduction. The low end is flabby in the way that says this was mastered for a club system that could forgive it. But there’s a specific kind of energy in that flabbiness—the mix isn’t precision-tuned for headphones. It was built for stacked JBLs in a room with bad acoustics, and that intention becomes part of the listening experience. You have to lean into it.
The second CD is where the album earns its keep. The first disc plays it relatively safe—house tempos, four-on-the-floor, vocal-friendly arrangements. But disc two opens with a “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” remix that sounds like it was assembled by someone who loved the original but thought it needed a proper breakdown. The track drops into near-silence at 2:14, then rebuilds using only the synth arpeggio and a kick that’s been layered with a white-noise burst. It’s a textbook DJ trick, but the execution is clinical. The engineer on this session—credited only as “Paul M.” in the liner notes that don’t really exist—knew exactly when to let the air out of the room.
There are mistakes all over this album. A snare flams on track seven. The mix of “Blue Monday” has a frequency spike around 3kHz that will hurt if you’re wearing bright headphones. The third “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” remix is a disaster—someone forgot to high-pass the vocal, and it clogs the low-mids like a drain. But these errors are evidence. This wasn’t a major-label project with three rounds of mastering. It was a needle-drop in a bedroom studio, probably a Mackie mixer and a DAT machine, and the person making it was trying to get a reaction on a dancefloor, not a review in Stereophile.
Tonight I heard something I’d missed: the “Tainted Love” remix uses the exact same kick sample as the “Sweet Dreams” track. Not a similar kick—the same one, unaltered, just pitched down a hair. That continuity suggests the whole project was built in a single session or a very tight window, with a limited sample library. It gives the album a cohesion that the track titles themselves don’t deserve. These aren’t separate songs anymore. They’re variations on a single idea: take the melody you remember, strip away the production you’ve gotten used to, and rebuild it from the kick up.
The album ends with a remix of “Relax” that sounds like it was accidentally sped up by three percent. The pitch is wrong, the vocalist sounds like they’ve been inhaling helium, and the bassline is an octave higher than the original. It should be unlistenable. Instead, it’s magnetic. The mistake becomes an artifact, and the artifact becomes the reason you stay for the final track instead of skipping ahead.
I don’t know who RTS is. The discogs entry, if it exists, says “Unknown Artist.” That feels right. This album is a document of a moment when the 80s were close enough to touch and far enough to exploit. It’s not a masterpiece. It’s a homemade mixtape that accidentally captured something about how we hear the past—always distorted, always a little off, and always worth another listen.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Billie Jean remix drops original bassline for first ninety seconds
- The 909 kick is pushed past clean reproduction into flabbiness
- Mastered for club systems with bad acoustics, not headphones
- Sweet Dreams remix drops to near-silence at 2:14
- Second CD opens with layered kick and white-noise burst
What original songs are remixed on this album?
The tracklist pulls from classic 80s pop: Michael Jackson, Eurythmics, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Cyndi Lauper, New Order, and more. Each track uses the original vocal melody heavily but replaces all instrumentation with drum machines and synths.
Is this an official release or a bootleg?
It is a white label compilation, likely unlicensed. There is no catalog number on the digipack, and most copies lack a barcode. The label credit to ‘RTS’ appears to be a production alias, not a registered imprint.
Why does the sound quality vary between tracks?
The remixes were probably created over a short period with different analogue gear. Some tracks were recorded hot into a DAT, causing distortion. The lack of professional mastering means levels and eq jump wildly from song to song.