Cannonball, Rebuilt for the Floor: MNEEMO and Flash Drop a Bootleg Remix of Lithe and Don Toliver
- MNEEMO
- 17 часов назад
- 5 мин. чтения
Half an hour before a Friday night set at Space Lounge by U9 in London, MNEEMO and Flash were not warming up. They were finishing a track.
The track was a bootleg remix of Cannonball, the Lithe and Don Toliver single that Atlantic Records dropped in July 2025 and that had spent the back half of the year drifting through hip hop blogs, club edits, and late-night car speakers across two continents. Hazy, dark, woozy, built on watery keys and bone-shattering 808s, the kind of record that sounds engineered for a long drive at 3 a.m. and for a club at 1 a.m. with equal precision.
MNEEMO had been listening to it for months. Flash had been thinking about it. That afternoon, in the studio, the conversation became the file. Half an hour later, they had a remix.
They closed the laptop, walked to Space Lounge by U9, and dropped it in the set the same night.
The room moved in a different way.
THE ORIGINAL
To understand why this remix lands the way it does, you have to start with Cannonball itself.
Lithe is an Australian singer, songwriter, and producer who has spent the last several years quietly building one of the more interesting catalogues in the new wave of cross-genre R&B and hip hop. He produced the Cannonball beat himself, alongside BBYKOBE and 206derek. Then he sent it to Don Toliver, the Texas rapper whose entire discography sits in the same haunted, melodic, after-hours zone, the same zone where Hardstone Psycho lived, the same zone that has made Don one of the most genre-resistant voices in current American rap.
When the two of them locked the track in the summer of 2025, it became one of those records that doesn't really belong to a genre. It belongs to a feeling. It is night music. It is car music. It is the music that plays in the room after the room has emptied out. The official video, directed by Lithe's longtime collaborator Omid Khasrawy and shot through a VHS lens, captured exactly that energy, two artists drifting through a city after dark, neon, blur, low end.
It is not, on first listen, a track that asks for a UK garage and tech house remix.
That is exactly why MNEEMO and Flash made one.
THE WORLD AROUND IT
This is not the first time MNEEMO has crossed paths with the Don Toliver universe. Earlier this month, HOUSE OF MNEEMO published a long piece on Never Come Back, the lead single from NIKITAIDISYUDA's debut album This Is A Flower, on which MNEEMO is credited as both composer and lyricist. That piece traced the production lineage of the album back to Tenseoh, the artist name of Lithuanian producer Šarünas Lekavičius, who also holds credits on Don Toliver's Hardstone Psycho, the 2024 record that hit number three on the Billboard 200 and went platinum.
In other words, the connection between the world MNEEMO is building in London and Warsaw and the world Don Toliver moves through in Houston and Los Angeles already exists. It runs through one producer who has worked on both sides. It runs through aesthetics that share more DNA than the genre tags suggest. The Cannonball remix is the second visible thread in what is starting to look like a longer pattern.
MNEEMO & FLASH CANNONBALL THE REMIX
Most remixes do not survive the transition from the producer's headphones to a club system. The reason is simple, and almost nobody talks about it openly: the producer never actually thought about which register the low end was supposed to sit in.
MNEEMO has spent years thinking about exactly that question.
Years of DJing his own records and other people's records in rooms ranging from London flats to 600-capacity venues in Warsaw have given him a specific kind of education that you cannot get from a tutorial or a plugin manual. He knows what a 50 Hz kick does in a small room versus a big one. He knows where a sub bass needs to sit so that it punches through a club PA without disappearing into mud at home on AirPods. He knows which frequencies the body actually feels and which ones the body just hears.
That knowledge is the secret architecture of every MNEEMO remix.
Where the original Cannonball lives in haze and wooziness, the remix gives it a UK floor. The vocal stays. The mood stays. The hedonistic, after-hours melancholy of Don Toliver's voice stays. But underneath all of it, something new is built, a percussive UK garage and tech house engine that turns the song from car music into floor music without sacrificing any of the things that made the original work in the first place.
Flash, who co-produced the remix, has been MNEEMO's collaborator across multiple Radar Records projects this year. The two of them have developed a way of working in studio that compresses what should take three days into thirty minutes, because they have already had every conversation about taste and direction that needs to happen. They show up. They listen once. They build.
THE TEST
The remix was finished in the afternoon. By midnight, it was being tested on a real system in a real room.
Space Lounge by U9, a London venue that pulls a crowd accustomed to electronic music done well, sits exactly in the kind of room where a remix either works or it doesn't. There is no middle ground on a good system. Either the bass moves people or it doesn't. Either the breakdown earns the drop or it doesn't.
The crowd answered the question within the first thirty seconds.
MNEEMO and Flash watched the floor respond and made the decision then and there. The remix was going out. Not as an Atlantic Records release. Not as a label single. As what it actually was, a free SoundCloud bootleg, in the tradition of every great DJ edit that has ever lived a second life on the internet because someone in a club heard it once and refused to let it go.
WHY BOOTLEG
There is a long-standing culture in dance music of bootleg remixes that exist outside the official release machine. Some of the most legendary edits in UK garage, house, and techno history started as exactly this: a producer who heard a track, made a version they wanted to play in their own sets, and quietly uploaded it as a free download for other DJs.
The bootleg form has rules. It cannot be sold. It will never be on Spotify. It exists for the dancefloor and for the SoundCloud community that still trades edits the way crate diggers used to trade vinyl.
That is exactly the right home for this version of Cannonball. It is not trying to compete with the original. It is paying tribute to the original by translating it into a different room.
WHERE TO LISTEN
For more from the artists involved: MNEEMO on Instagram, Flash on Instagram, and Radar Records on Instagram.
MORE FROM THE RADAR ERA SERIES
HOUSE OF MNEEMO is a world still being built. Editorial, releases, and archive at mneemo.com.
