The night before Thanksgiving 1997, Madonna was partying with drag queens, circus performers, and fire-eaters. It was the second anniversary celebration for Liquid, the ultra-glamorous Miami party spot co-owned by the singer’s close friend and rumored lover, Ingrid Casares. In Madonna’s book Sex, Casares is the one who straddled railings and demanded to be finger-fucked; at Liquid, she was the vibe curator-in-chief who conjured its atmosphere of haute-bohemian pansexual debauchery—the kind Madonna had depicted in her “Deeper and Deeper” video a few years before. Casares’ club was a magnet for models, moguls, and pop stars, who would shimmy to resident DJs like Junior Vasquez, Victor Calderone, and Danny Tenaglia on velvet banquettes, raise glasses to their beautiful lives, and enjoy the excellent local cocaine.

Just after midnight on November 26, Madonna and her entourage arrived and slipped the DJ a CD-R containing remixes of unreleased tracks. Everyone lost it. “All of a sudden, you heard the very beginning of Ray of Light,” said Casares, likely referring to William Orbit’s Liquid Mix of the title track. “Once people realized that it was her, they went really crazy. Even the mayor of Miami started dancing. At six o’clock in the morning, I was still pushing people out.” Veronica Electronica had arrived.

In multiple interviews promoting Ray of Light in early 1998, Madonna described Veronica Electronica as a club-music obsessed “alter ego” who represented the flipside to the Kabbalah-wise spiritualist of her seventh studio album. She planned to release a collection of remixes and outtakes under the name that fall that included the “totally out of control” 10-minute original version of “Ray of Light” and unreleased “tripped-out, ambient shit” she had worked on with Orbit, the co-producer of all but one of the album’s songs. The idea of Veronica Electronica still feels like a thrilling prospect. Its parent album is near-mythic at this point for its, well, liquid fusion of Bristol dub, stormy breakbeat, metal riffs, and posh orchestration, and a reappraisal could have created a musical dialogue with Ray of Light’s contemporary acolytes, pop singers who slip into moonbathing reveries at the rave.

That isn’t the version of Veronica Electronica we got 27 years later. Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album. There’s precious little trace of Orbit, and judging by a pointed recent statement calling it “a knockoff,” he wasn’t involved. Instead, the album pristinely remasters the big-tent donks of mixes by the Liquid lot—and some of them still hit. BT and Sasha’s Bucklodge Ashram New Edit of “Drowned World / Substitute for Love” turns the existential original into a Euro banger, whipping its desolate bridge into a frenzy like fiendish jockeys forcing a thoroughbred faster, faster, before a pyrotechnic drop. New York DJ Victor Calderone’s New Edit of “Sky Fits Heaven” buffs its percussion and turbo-charges the zaps that halo Madonna’s voice with a euphoric final chorus which, like the classic Above & Beyond Club Mix of “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” makes you want to cry and scream and dance all at once.