Pezzner and Carerra & Tavares push Rework's Good For Ya into two different rooms

Vanessa Nguyen · 25 June 2023

Good For Ya came out on Get Physical on 16 June. Three tracks, eighteen minutes, one vocal run through two different remixers. It's Rework's first release for the label after two decades on Playhouse, My Favorite Robot and their own Exlove imprint. The original sets the terms, and the two remixes push further than it does — not toward a peak-time swing, but toward two dependable versions of the same song. We'd call it a workhorse of a record: a lot of venues and times where either remix will drop in fine, nothing here that's too crazy.

Three tracks, and nothing here is wasted. The original clears five minutes, both remixes stretch out well past it without padding. It's built to move across a whole night rather than get chopped up for one edit.

Get Physical's been around since 2002, started in Berlin by M.A.N.D.Y., DJ T and Booka Shade. The label built its name through the "Body Language" years, the run of tracks and mix compilations that helped push tech-leaning house onto festival stages rather than leaving it in warehouses, and it won Label of the Year in 2005 for exactly that run. Rework spent the two decades before this record on other people's labels and, since 2021, on the duo's own Exlove. Good For Ya is the first time Get Physical's carried their name.

The song itself runs 5:19. A slinky, mid-tempo groove built on warm, rounded kicks, synths that sit just off to the side of the beat, and a vocal that ducks in and out rather than carrying the whole track. On its own it works best mid-set, somewhere a room's already warm but hasn't peaked yet, a track to hold rather than open or close with. It's house structure wrapped around a pop instinct, the register Michael Kuebler and Daniel Varga have worked since starting the project in Stuttgart in 2000, first with vocalist Laetitia Rometsch, later alongside Sascha Hedgehog until he left in 2015. They've run it as a duo ever since, most recently through Love Love, an EP they put out on their own Exlove in April, two months before this one.

Pezzner takes it to 7:09 and moves the whole thing into daylight. The chords open up and the tension drops out. The groove gets room to breathe instead of push, and the vocal stays right where it was, just set against a lighter frame. He's a Seattle producer who's already at home on Get Physical, alongside credits on Dirtybird, Freerange, Crosstown Rebels and Kompakt. This is the version for a rooftop at six, not a basement at two.

Carerra & Tavares go the other way at 5:50, tighter and more percussive, aimed at later in the night than the original reaches for. Ella Carerra and Valerie Tavares are a Toronto duo who've built their catalogue on the more melodic end of house, with releases on Bedrock and Music Is 4 Lovers behind them, plus a Juno nomination for "Tomorrow" the year before. Their version is built for after midnight, once a room's already moving and needs pushing rather than easing in.

Put the three together and what you get is a handoff. Rework wrote the song. Two producers from two different scenes decided what happens to it next, rather than the duo handling the whole EP themselves. For a first release on a new label, that's a solid way to introduce yourself — it puts one song to work in more rooms than the original reaches alone, without ever asking a room to do something it isn't already doing. A rooftop set can open with it. A room already moving past midnight can close with it. Same three tracks, same eighteen minutes, two dependable nights.

Find Rework on Instagram, Pezzner on Instagram, and Carerra & Tavares on Instagram. Stream Good For Ya on Spotify.