Deep in the horrible, dank, depressing, dark recesses of a late night/early morning YouTube binge recently, I came across something that changed the way I was to think of dance music forever. By now I thought I'd seen it all. I was wrong.Get past the interminable terrible cover versions, the grim and grainy rips of terrible DJ sets by DJs you've never heard of, and the endless interviews with producers who have nothing to say and dance YouTube can occasionally drip feed you something that's so terrible that you're transfixed, rooted to your trackpad, horrified, appalled, and oddly turned on.
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Just before I shut the lid of my laptop and thought about retiring shamefaced to bed, I heard the unmistakable waft of the third worst instrument ever invented: the panpipes. The panpipes, an instrument normally only heard outside malls or in garden centres, are slightly better than the saxophone and the bagpipes but worse than every other musical instrument out there - even the fretless bass. What in the fresh hell was this, I wondered.This, it turned out, was the work of Twitter joyboy @PrayForPatrick, a man known to most as that bloke who watches old episodes of Corrie and posts screenshots of them night after night. When he's not enjoying a bath, watching the darts or schooling us on Les Battersby's sartorial stances, he's reworking some of your favourite tunes old and new as panpipe heavy parpers. The one that piped up out at us - sorry - that fateful night was this haunting cover of minimal mainstay and ketamine house rabbit hole hunter Ricardo Villalobos' timeless "Easy Lee"The original is one of the great records of the 00s, a truly alien, warped, weird thing, that, like other Villalobos cuts from that period ("Dexter", "Fizheurer, Zieheuer") seem to defy time and gravity, existing in a trippy world of their own. Patrick's version is….more rooted to reality. A horrible, cheap, squalid, rank, nasty, tacky, shitty reality. But probably a bit more real than the one that Ricky himself seems to stumble about in most of the time.
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Fret not, those of you who aren't into cosmically extended undancable 36 minute acid house workouts, because it isn't jus Chilean tech-weirdos who've been given the breathy treatment by the soap addict. Bruno Mars has been taken on a panpiped journey uptown, as has Taylor Swift and, errr, Haddaway.Anyone really, really into Norris Cole and the third worst instrument ever has found a new saviour.Follow PrayForPatrick on TwitterJosh Baines is on Twitter too