“I used to do a lot, but I don’t anymore.” That was Claude Vonstroke’s own personal take on the remix format in a recent interview with ITM, and by association, his own Makeovers collection. “On the majority of those tracks, I made an original using the sounds from their song. It’s not like their song with a new drum beat under it. Most of the time, I’m like, ‘Damn, I wish that was just my song’.” It’s a fairly honest assessment that pretty much sums up Makeovers from the start; essentially, it’s a collection of instantly identifiable VonStroke weapons that bear little resemblance to the originals.

Makeovers opens with the stomping broken beats of his mix of DJ Blaqstarr’s Shake It To The Ground, and if he’s currently talking about how house and “bass music” are intermingling in his sets, then this demonstrates it’s an ideology that’s actually always been present in his music. Even more characteristic for VonStroke, though, is his silly, wacky sense of fun – evidenced in the animal howls that greet the pinnacle of the buildup in Shake It To The Ground, it’s also out in force on Andy Caldwell’s Warriors, the various elements rising in pitch, wobbling about and playfully interacting with each other.

There’s plenty more examples like this on Makeovers; his mix of Girl Unit’s Wut is loaded with whoops and shrieks, while the manic silliness he concocts with Scott Grooves’ Mothership Reconnection makes you feel like you’ve walked into a zoo where all the cages have been thrown open, chimpmunks and chimpanzees screeching at you at every turn. There’s always something wild and silly going on, with his quirky sense present on every last remix here. It’s something that’s absent from a lot of the sombre, serious club music we’re accustomed to, and it’s what separates VonStroke and his Dirty Bird stable from the pack.

Amongst all this fun though, it’s easy to forget just how polished he is a producer he is. While VonStroke might be hurling all these wild, unexpected elements into the fray, importantly, he’s also wrapping them up in tight, rock-solid grooves. Looking at Camjere’s Percolator, one of the most memorable remixes he’s turned out so far, he takes the vocal sample, chops it up and twirls it around a bumping bassline and all manner of techno swirls and wobbles. Here and everywhere else, it’s the oddness that becomes the rhythm. Meanwhile, his roaring remix of Pocket 808’s Warpaint uses barely more than a few bleeps and whistles, percolating over the top of a bassline that pitches up, up and up into the stratosphere. With these few sparse elements he manages to create a weapon of absolute dancefloor fury, one of the heaviest under-the-radar dancefloor destroyers we’ve heard in the past five years or so.

What Makeovers lacks though is any kind of ‘bigger picture’ approach. For the sake of comparison, if you look to Trentemoller’s Chronicles as a release that grouped a similarly impressive catalogue of remixes, there they were cleverly spun together to tell a grander tale. There’s none of that love and attention here. Ultimately, Makeovers is a mighty big slab of Claude VonStroke excellence, which ironically you might as well have compiled yourself after a simple artist search on Beatport. This makes it hard to recommend beyond the diehards, and anyone after a more comprehensive VonStroke experience will be better off digging out last year’s Five Years of Dirtybird anthology.