Roger Sanchez is giving his comeback album a second life. The Grammy-winning house veteran released Spectrum Refracted today via his own Stealth Records, a six-track companion piece to Spectrum, the full-length he put out back in June after a 20-year wait between albums. This latest project, Spectrum Refracted, serves as a testament to his enduring influence on the electronic music landscape.
The spin-off leans heavily on remix talent, starting with a headline turn from David Morales, who reworks ‘Canto Al Amor.’ Morales is a New York house peer of Sanchez’s in his own right—a Grammy winner himself and one of the genre’s defining remixers going back to the Def Mix days—so pairing the two names on one release carries some weight for anyone who’s followed house music out of NYC since the ’90s.
Beyond the Morales remix, the project includes one new original from Sanchez himself: ‘Feel Free,’ featuring vocalist EMan. Sanchez also handles two of his own reworks on the tracklist, Flower Power remixes of ‘How Do We Say Goodbye’ (with Karen Harding) and ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’ (with Melanie C)—both of which he’s been testing out all summer at his Pacha Ibiza residency. Dani Masi contributes a remix of ‘Temptation,’ and the package closes with a version of ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’ from Serdar Guven and Ahmed Ahmedov, picked by Sanchez and Melanie C out of hundreds of submissions in a global remix contest run with Beatport.
“These remixes and my unreleased track with Eman have been secret weapons all summer long—at my Pacha Flower Power residency in Ibiza and all around Europe,” Sanchez said. “I wanted to share them with everyone in the way I see and hear them—like light refracting from a prism, changing the way you see it, these versions represent an alternative way to experience songs from my album ‘Spectrum.'”
For those unfamiliar with the name, Sanchez has been a fixture of house music for over three decades, running back to his roots in Corona, Queens, where he came up through New York’s hip-hop scene as a b-boy and graffiti artist before dropping out of architecture studies at Pratt to chase music full time. He’s credited with more than two thousand productions and remixes across his career, including a 2001 single, ‘Another Chance,’ that hit number one in the UK. He won a Grammy for Best Remixed Recording in 2003 for his work on No Doubt’s ‘Hella Good,’ and his remix catalogue also includes Michael Jackson, The Police, Diana Ross, Jamiroquai and Maroon 5.
He’s also spent years building out his own infrastructure in the genre, founding Stealth Recordings and UNDR THE RADR, and hosting the radio show Release Yourself, which reaches more than 20 million listeners across over thirty markets. Ibiza has been part of his story since 2000, with past residencies at Space, Cream, Glitterbox, Defected, Pacha and Amnesia, and this year’s Flower Power residency at Pacha adding to that run alongside European festival dates and Hacienda Classical appearances.
Spectrum Refracted is out today on Stealth Records.
