Concentric Pleasures: Bodycode, Faze Action and Kotchy

This week, Ghostly International's Spectral sublabel releases Immune, the impressive new album by Bodycode. Inspired by the classic deep house of New York and Chicago, it nevertheless sounds little like anything else from the recent deep-house revival. That might have something to do with the background of Alan Abrahams (pictured). He was raised in a South African township, where he began producing after he discovered Chicago house music -- not so unlikely, considering the music's centrality to South African kwaito. He moved to London in 1997, recorded a handful of EPs and founded his S�d Electronic label; today his discography includes releases on Perlon, ~scape, Musik Krause and Spectral, which signed his Bodycode alias. But unlike most of his peers, he didn't wind up in Berlin. Instead, Abrahams relocated to Lisbon, whose qualities -- a postcolonial city on the periphery of Europe -- are evident in the way he comes at dance music from the margins. His shuddering machine rhythms and balmy chords don't break radically with house traditions; his tough, rubbery basslines come straight from Larry Heard, via Luomo, and there are plenty of pumping chords, woozy leads and soulful vocals. But like Pepe Bradock, Move D and DJ Koze, Bodycode manages to make the music sound unusually alive and refreshingly weird. It's flush with hazy, underwater melodies and electronically treated tribal percussion, so you're never quite sure what's really going on -- just that the music makes perfect sense, once you're deep inside it.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the deep end, England's Faze Action recently released their first album in five years, Stratus Energy. Following a handful of recent singles (and a nice boost last year from Carl Craig's remix of their reissued single "In the Trees"), the new album continues to mine the same vein of classic disco that they've been working for a decade. Chugging Italo synths and Gamble & Huff strings are all over this thing; the sound of it is enormous, a mammoth amalgam of live instruments and dubby studio smarts. For highlights, check the happily overblown "Danae's Journey," the Bullitt-worthy thrill ride "Stratus Energy" and "Keep It Coming," an invigorating fusion of cocksure string vamps and fibrillating Clavinets.

That rather purplish prose makes as good a transition as any to the last album I want to discuss, Kotchy's 89. I don't know if he's explicitly down with dudes like Gemmy, Guido and Joker -- who have settled upon "purple" as the working title for their shared approach to dubstep and hip-hop -- but his knock-kneed beats and garishly colored synths certainly bear similarities. The Brooklyn musician's lurching beats lean closer to boom-bap: Prefuse 73, Dabrye, Flying Lotus and of course Dilla are obvious antecedents. But Kotchy's mix of electro-acoustic samples and buzzy synths doesn't sound much like anyone else, and the vocal tracks are even weirder, suggesting an accidental fusion of Mouse on Mars and the Sea and Cake over clomping, clunky breaks that seem to reassemble themselves with every bar. Just because this funk is far-fetched doesn't mean it won't make a believer out of you.