Feel Zem Tried to Remix Depeche Mode's Master and Servant and Came Out with Some Anxious Ones
A Russian Producer’s Five-Track IDM EP Grew Out of a 1984 Synth-Pop Single
The whip on Master and Servant was never a whip. Depeche Mode tried to sample a real one in 1984, gave up, and built the sound from their producer, Daniel Miller, hissing and spitting in the studio. That song is where Some Anxious Ones began. Feel Zem, a producer from Moscow, Russia, set out to remix it and came out with five tracks of their own, released on 23 July 2021.
Feel Zem’s Skies, the opener of Some Anxious Ones, now plays in our playlist below, and the producer’s earlier coverage sits on Feel Zem’s artist profile. PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks, brought Some Anxious Ones to ElectronicMusic.News. Hit play on Skies, then read on for the 1984 single the EP grew out of.
Depeche Mode Sampled a Hiss for the Whip on Master and Servant, the Song Behind Some Anxious Ones
Master and Servant came out on 20 August 1984 as the second single from Some Great Reward, the fourth album by Depeche Mode. Mute Records released the album that September. The Depeche Mode single reached the UK top ten, and its lyrics were explicit enough that some radio stations refused to play it.
However, the production is the part that still matters to electronic producers. By 1984, Depeche Mode were working with samplers, as they had on Construction Time Again the year before. So the whip on the Depeche Mode record is a sampled noise, not a synthesiser patch, and Depeche Mode sampled other sounds from the room as well.
That method outlived Depeche Mode’s synth-pop years. Later, Depeche Mode’s songs became raw material for other electronic producers, and Depeche Mode collected the results. Remixes 81-04 arrived in 2004, and Remixes 2: 81-11 followed on Mute in June 2011. The second set handed the catalogue to producers from IDM, club music and Nordic electronica.
Feel Zem Turned an Unfinished Remix Into Some Anxious Ones, Five Instrumental Tracks in Under 21 Minutes
The remix attempt produced five tracks of the producer’s own. Together they run 20 minutes and 48 seconds: Skies (4:06), Sad OK (5:04), Muuv (4:21), Weeer Yeah (2:17) and Nine (5:00). The producer has said the EP seems to carry something of Depeche Mode’s music, which is as close as the record comes to naming its source.
Feel Zem, credited as Philipp Zemlyanukhin, wrote the opener, Skies. The alias is a shortening, and the producer explains that the real Russian name is simply too long. By their own description, they are a graphic and web designer and a beginning musician.
Even before any of that, Feel Zem was a DJ. The first mixes went up in 2012, and the Lёt mix series reached its 27th edition in October 2021, three months after the EP.
On Bandcamp, the EP is filed under IDM, downtempo, melodic techno, synthwave and psychedelic, and it is marked instrumental. That spread is telling, because the tags run from listening music to the edge of the floor, roughly the range Depeche Mode’s own songs were remixed across. In practice, it makes for an intricate, glitchy record rather than a club tool.
The EP also sits early in the catalogue. Feel Zem released three singles in 2020, then Nine & Exercice in 2021, before Some Anxious Ones. To the Sun followed in February 2022, and by 2026 the producer had moved towards glitch-ambient.
The producer has said the cover design is no accident. It sets a single bloom on a long stem, broken into glitched pixels, against a grey painted sky. It also uses paintings by Ira Boronina and Anastasia Datsyuk. Depeche Mode fans may think of the red rose Anton Corbijn put on the cover of Violator in 1990.
Clark, Trentemøller and Röyksopp Also Took Depeche Mode Songs Somewhere New
Clark is the closest neighbour for anyone who comes to Feel Zem through IDM. Christopher Clark began releasing on Warp Records in 2001, and on Remixes 2: 81-11 he reworked Freestate.
Trentemøller, the Danish producer and multi-instrumentalist, took the club route instead. His Club Remix of Wrong sits on the same compilation.
Röyksopp, the Norwegian duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland, remixed Puppets for it. Their 2001 debut, Melody A.M., secured their place in electronica.
Feel Zem’s own attempt belongs to the same habit. The difference is scale: a designer and DJ working alone, a year into releasing music, rather than a commission from Mute.
From the ElectronicMusic.News curator team: “Skies sits fifth in our downtempo playlist, straight after Thievery Corporation’s Lebanese Blonde. It also runs straight into Feel Zem’s own Май, -12.5 ℃, so the 2021 EP and the 2026 one play back to back, five years apart.”
Where to Hear Some Anxious Ones in Full and Follow Feel Zem Between Releases
Start with Skies, then play the EP in order, because the five tracks were made as one attempt.
Stream Some Anxious Ones on Bandcamp or YouTube Music. Follow Feel Zem on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, SoundCloud, Yandex Music, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Mixcloud, where the Lёt mixes live.
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