Concentric Pleasures: Kate Simko, Voodeux, Damian Lazarus

Now would be as good a time as any to jot down Kate Simko's name in your mental playlist. The Chicago musician has been slowly building a name for herself over the past couple of years with a handful of singles and compilation tracks for Ghostly's dance-oriented Spectral Sound sublabel. She's gradually sculpted an austere, minimalist template to fit a personal style that becomes more apparent with every release. Her grooves are hypnotic but never stifling, her melodic and harmonic sensibilities supple but never overbearing -- a sensual economy. Her upcoming Take You There EP, featuring a remix from Berlin-based former Seattlite Bruno Pronsato, is the best thing she's done yet: tough, confident, dark minded. While you wait for that, though, experience a very different side of Simko with Music from the Atom Smashers, her full-length soundtrack to a documentary about the physicists behind Fermilab's particle collider. Even if the search for top quarks and the Higgs boson sounds to you more like a hungover hunt for unidentifiable but inexplicably compelling fried foods, Simko's score makes plenty of sense on its own, punctuating rich, glitch-infused synth swells -- echoes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, as processed by Oval -- with the occasional foray into terse, brooding tech-house.

"Terse" and "brooding" could equally describe The Paranormal by Voodeux, a duo signed to Claude Von Stroke's Mothership label. But there's nothing hushed about their debut longplayer. Influenced by Matthew Dear's sickly undulations as Audion, their music is unremittingly dark, but they lavish their attention on flickering points of light. On "Enter the Voo," hi-hats and hand claps and buzzy, high-tension vibrations light up like fireworks against an inky backdrop of bass. "Frank the Janitor" is jacking house as horror-film score; "Deadend Motel" uses reverb like Silly Putty, imprinting finely detailed percussive patterns and stretching them into absurd, even comic shapes. You do begin to wish for more; the B-movie kitsch ("The End") and "spooky" effect ("The Paranormal") don't always compensate for grooves that tangle up in needless fills and frills. But on a track like "Just a Spoonful," which updates the pumping chords of deep house with playful sound design and one twisted rabbit hole of a breakdown, they easily rise to meet widescreen proportions.

Electronic music doesn't seem to generate as many polarizing records as rock and pop do. Maybe that's because of electronic music's peculiar tendency to splinter into new subgenres whenever a potentially polarizing element presents itself. But Damian Lazarus' Smoke the Monster Out is likely to spark conversation and maybe raise hackles. Lazarus (pictured above) is best known as a purveyor of dark, lean house and techno, both via his DJ sets and his label, Crosstown Rebels, home to underground club favorites like Jamie Jones, Dinky and Butane. Smoke the Monster Out veers at a 45-degree angle away from that baseline, wrapping oddball pop experiments around house-inspired grooves. That's not without precedent, of course. Michael Mayer and Superpitcher's Supermayer project evinced a similarly madcap vibe, tweaking techno convention (and purists' noses) with a left-field, slightly unhinged pop sensibility. (A year or two ago, Lazarus partnered with Mayer to promote Stink, a short-lived Ibiza party whose crosswise, rebel spirit apparently wasn't a good fit for the island's megaclub marketplace.) I'm not sure that all of Smoke the Monster Out, Lazarus' full-length studio debut, entirely works; the short sketches feel like they want to become longer tracks, while some of the longer tracks are too stuffed with ideas. The tone feels off, as well. The subtle grandeur of "Moment" is let down by "Memory Box," a plodding electro-house number assembled around a spoken-word vocal: "I don't like this game/ Trying to remember your name/ I don't recall what you said/ My memory box is dead." Most likely conceived upon returning to the studio after a long, lost weekend behind the decks somewhere, it probably seemed like a good idea that Monday. Still, for a kind of happily addled merrymaking, the record shows ample charm.