If you’ve been following along with this column since its inception, you’ll know that themes often emerge from a given month’s stack of releases. But this time around things are particularly interesting, in that this month’s batch of records can be divided fairly neatly into four categories. First, we’ve got some of the best ultra-functional dance music we’ve heard in a while—notably, Berlin techno and Chicago booty house. Then, there’s a whole set of deeply weird and wild releases that are more about cascading and catapulting sounds than they are any given genre. Finally, we’ve got some albums defined by really heavyweight emotional content. Then, there’s a special few that join all three. It’s been a great reminder that electronic music really can nourish mind, body and soul—sometimes all at once.
Ghoßt Assembly
I Miss Your Love (The Remixes)
Vinyl LP
The slo-mo, heartstring-tugging house music of DJ Abigail Ward’s debut single was easily one of last year’s best releases—and now, here it is again. The gut-punch emotional impact of the original can’t be beaten, and the new mixes wisely don’t try to. Instead, DJ Absolutely Shit turns the track hardcore, bumping up the tempo and adding breakbeats, transforming it into a big sweaty monster. Elsewhere, Brian Not Brian and Piers Harrison space it out into a bongo-dub jam that’ll have you swaying with your eyes closed in a state of absolute bliss.
Joker
“Elastic Band” b/w “Small Room”
Bristol producer Joker’s blend of dubstep, grime, and hip-hop rhythms with sharply produced funk-synth workouts never gets old, particularly as his studio finesse keeps increasing. The title “Elastic Band” is a strong clue to the sound, as the lead synths squawk, bend, stretch, and twang around a super-bouncy beat, while a techno remix by DJ ADHD keeps the personality of the track intact, despite squaring off the drums. “Small Room” is just as bouncy, but lets swells of emotional chords rise and fall through its wonderfully odd, stop-start, skipetty rhythm.
Tudor Acid
Discarded Shadows
Cassette
Richard “Tudor Acid” Wigglesworth’s entire oeuvre has been an extended act of world building, joining the dots from ambient electronica circa 1994 backward through its influences, like the electropop of New Order and Depeche Mode, to create a very personal emotional palette. With each album, he extends this world a little more in a new direction. On this, his eighth LP, that shift comes from playing his keyboard melodies live. That doesn’t mean jamming or improvisation, though: The motifs remain incredibly minimalist and plaintive in their repetition. But the humanity of the playing resonates against the sequenced patterns to create a beautiful fragility. There’s also some very peculiar use of hiss and fizz here that adds a particular type of ghostliness. All in all, a compelling dream world.
Hifi Sean & David McAlmont
Daylight
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The duo of sometime Soup Dragon “Hifi” Sean Dickson and journeyman diva David McAlmont has clearly hit a rich creative seam. Following last year’s Happy Ending LP, they’ve got no less than two albums coming this year, starting with Daylight. It’s a real maturation of the symbiosis between McAlmont’s gorgeous high croon and Dickson’s steady-stepping electronic grooves. They’ve found a style that isn’t quite house, nor electropop, nor trip-hop, nor soul, but something entirely their own. And here, they’ve clearly really thought hard about the album structure. Individual tracks are lush in themselves, but taken as a whole, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Give it a dedicated listen and the way the triumphant final tracks “Celebrate” and “The Show” hit will take your breath away.
Funk Assault
Paces of Places
2 x Vinyl LP
This is Berlin techno pure and simple. Well, certainly very pure, but maybe not so simple. Every track on this album is about the huge kickdrum pummeling away—pure forward momentum and the most minimal of riffs. It’s techno as folk form, serving a specific purpose and not swerving from that. As the label name and stick-man motifs suggest, it’s rooted in primal instincts and basic body moviement. But the production, the micro-dynamics, the subtle effects that allow mind-bending alteration of mood over time, and the inventiveness of sound making are hugely sophisticated. They may be basic in their function, but these sonic machines are the state of the art.
Mana Drop
Voxvoxvox EP
The label Next Year’s Snow specializes in completely brain-wrong genre meltdowns—to the point that even though this is one of their more straightforward releases, it’s still very, very odd indeed. Moon Rack label affiliate Mana Drop has previously described himself as “janky and overstimulated,” and while that’s perhaps a little unfair, it’s a useful starting point. Whether making Four Tet-ish thumb piano trip-hop (“Lamp”), high-speed bongo rave (“E-sprint”), or more indefinable grooves or atmospheres, there’s always something off-beam that seems wrong at first but feels better and better the more you immerse.
Matías Levy
Espektra
Argentine composer Matías Levy really does redefine retro-future on this soundtrack to a dance piece by Isabella Sidotti. In both tonality and composition you can hear the prog, jazz fusion, and soundtrack vibes of Tomita, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre. But just when you think it seems familiar, a timbre will explode into deconstructed club complexity, a techno beat will rise up, or a weird time signature will throw everything leftwards. The shift from the multidimensional breakcore of “Espektra 4” into the beautiful but slightly off-kilter sci-fi movie theme of “Espektra 5” is a fantastic bit of psychic rug-pulling, and really demonstrates a maverick at work.
Seo
Assmix 5000 Xtra
Talking of mavericks, Eseomo Mayaki is the very definition of an outsider artist. The Lagos-based singer-songwriter-promoter is endlessly prolific, generally with variants on mutant pop or R&B. But on two EPs this month, she’s in instrumental mode—and even more out-there than usual. There’s no attempt to live up to normal production standards or genre conventions, just peculiar noises and wobbly rhythms very deliberately expressing…something. It’s certainly not arbitrary; there’s definitely a distinct purpose here. But what that might be, only she knows. It’s very good, though.
College Hill
M1 Jam
College Hill, aka Morphologist, has covered a lot of musical bases in her time, often specializing in maximalist electronica and unlikely mashups. Here, though, she’s focused on showcasing a single element: The Korg M1 keyboard’s “Organ 2” sound, which has featured in untold classic house, garage, club, and rave tunes (most notably in recent years highlighted in Beyoncé’s “Break my Soul”). Over these five variations, simple house or rave patterns are set up with the organ chiming out its basic rave signal; but the tracks evolve in unexpected but organic ways, with tones and melodies unfolding to tell complex stories and hit some really deep emotive spots. The fifth variation interpolates Gregory Isaacs’s “Slave Master” vocal creating a completely boggling rewiring of musical history.
Rhys Manning
Reverie
In structure, these are fairly standard, Ibiza-friendly disco-electro-house kinds of party music. But British producer Rhys Manning elevates them massively with lead synths that leap around like they’re spring loaded. Who knows what he’s doing with the pitchbend and modwheel, but on both of these tunes, fairly simple riffs jump, cartwheel, and somersault over one another like Day-Glo lines in graffiti. It’s joyous and hilarious, and almost starts to feel like a new genre is being born as the riffs cavort and squiggle around you.
Ambien Baby
Masa EP
Vinyl LP
Ambien Baby are a truly cosmopolitan duo: Daniel Rincon—aka NAP—grew up in Colombia and now lives in Mexico; Sophie Sweetland—aka D. Tiffany—was born in British Columbia and has spent significant time in Melbourne collaborating with the likes of Roza Terenzi. But they connected as best friends and formed Ambien Baby duo in Vancouver. As their name suggests, their sound is narcotic in the extreme, with waves of haze, eerie samples; disembodied and inhuman voices; and sharp subliminal sounds zipping around in the background—all of it surrounding thumping, pumping Latin house grooves. It’s very funky, but it’ll take you by the hand and lead you into down some rather dark alleyways.
Traxman
Jukepop EP
Many of Chicago’s juke/footwork producers have embraced high-tech production values, abstracting their rhythms and otherwise pushing the sound into new spaces. Not so Corky “Traxman” Strong, who started with both feet on the dancefloor of high-speed booty house of the mid-‘90s, and who keeps them there now. Fancy sonics are for the birds; he clearly cares only about the primacy of the groove, relentless repetition that dancers can lock onto, and freaky mental effects based on roughly chopping whatever samples come into his hands. Plus, there’s the added bonus of a dose of the purest acid like only Chicago can do in “Wetdisk.” It doesn’t want to do anything new—and it’s all the better for it.
