NEW GLOUCESTER, ME — Maine’s pre-eminent bluegrass band, The World Famous Grassholes, announce today they will release their next single, “There Is a Time (INSMNC Remix),” on Black Friday, Nov. 24. It is the first in a planned series of releases where local and national electronic producers take the band’s raw WAV files from their April 2023 release, “Gently Used,” and remix them as they see fit, producing new and unexpected sounds and emotional appeal. 

The band will celebrate the song’s release with a show at Sun Tiki, in Portland, as part of a three-band bill with Becca Biggs and Toby McAllister and the Sierra Sounds, on Dec. 8, starting at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. 

Originally, “There Is a Time” appeared on the Grassholes’ latest album as a slow and haunting cover, sung by bassist Flann O’Brien, of the Rodney Dillard and Mitch Jayne tune, released in 1963 as a Dillards song on the Andy Griffith Show. What you’ll hear on the 24th is radically changed, with a hip-hop beat, back-checking rhythm, and a new melody created from the fiddle solo. South Jersey-based INSMNC — who himself just released a new production with rapper Ang’Geon, “Bagpipe Dreams” — produced two versions, one down-tuned, the other with O’Brien’s original vocal level, for a “light mode” and “dark mode” version of the release. 

Leaning into a tradition that’s populated with amazing work by the likes of Moby, Mike Butler, and Barrio Lindo, INSMNC took acoustic, live-recorded sounds and broke them into pieces, remixing them into something that is both loyal to the original tune and a creative new work in its own right.

Other producers are currently playing with Grassholes tracks, and the band hope to release one new remix per quarter through 2024. We’ll see what happens!