Melleefresh / Insatiable
Insatiable
Genre: House
Named as “one of the pivotal figures in North American dance music” by Clash Magazine, Melleny Melody (aka Melleefresh) has been an avant-garde music artist for nearly 30 years. But it wasn’t until her shift into house music and its variations in the mid-2000s that she truly found her voice.
Melleefresh At Play, Vol. 1 functions as the first in a series of “best of” collections that chart the artist’s journey from the first use of the name Melleefresh while collaborating with Alixander III (aka Dirty 30) to her latest work, Studio 54, a retrospective on her experiences at New York City’s legendary discotheque.
This album is a story of collaborations. It kicks off with three of Melleefresh’s biggest bangers - Beautiful, Rich & Horny, with Dirty 30, remixed in 2005 by a then-up-and-coming deadmau5; Hey Baby, with deadmau5, the first #1 hit for both artists on dance music platform Beatport; and Let’s Get Dirty, with the UK’s Hoxton Whores (aka Stereo Scum.) Other collaborators include fellow Canadians MC Flipside and Chris Vench on Jerome Robins’ remix of the track Kontrolling You, Alex G on his remix of Apparition, and techno androgyne Boy Pussy on the track Naughty Girl.
More recent releases are well-represented here with the future house track Space Queen (with San Francisco’s Spekrfreks), French jackin’ house DJ Peter Brown’s masterful remix of the playful Candy Cane, and Afterhours Redux, a complete upgrade on her Juno Award-nominated track from 2008. Then of course, there is the aforementioned brand-new disco house track Studio 54, made with Glaswegian disco/funk producer Hotknife.
The album closes out with Insatiable, a previously unreleased track from Melleefresh’s sessions with Dirty 30. While sections of her vocal track have been employed in other tracks since then, this is the first release of the original mix in all its dirty house glory.
Melleefresh At Play, Vol. 1 is the quintessential Mellee collection for those music listeners who’ve never heard her work before. For everyone else, we’re just getting started.
