Concentric Pleasures: Rye Rye, Franz Ferdinand, Mark Templeton

When Baltimore's Rye Rye guested on Blaqstarr's "Shake It to the Ground," it wasn't what she sang but how she sang it that grabbed people's attention. High-pitched invocations to "Shake it to the ground/ Move it, move it, move it, move it" bobbed in the air like helium balloons weighted by lead ballast, imbued with the curious energy of the Chipmunks sucking on sizzurp. (It didn't hurt that Blaqstarr's woozy production served the weirdest aspects of the adolescent rapper's gangsta hiccup.) Rye Rye's distinctive delivery found its match on "Bang," a match-up with M.I.A. in which Blaqstarr's samba-school breaks spread like a nest around the singers' nasal birdcalls, and now Buraka Som Sistema and DJ Sega have remixed the track to sound even loonier. The "Buraka Carnival Remix" offers an explosive mix of soca-inspired drums, carnival whistles and gleefully cheesy rave stabs, while their "WTF I Asked for a Kuduro Remix" is a rave-y slab of breakbeat hardcore mayhem. Sega, meanwhile, strips back the backing track to nothing but rough-cut snares, the better to isolate Rye Rye and M.I.A.'s a cappella face-off.

Bloc Party's Intimacy Remixed shows how hard it is to give an entire album the remix treatment. For a band whose albums hew to the classic longplayer format, the piecemeal approach to different sounds — melancholy IDM, adrenaline-heavy electro, tech-y drum 'n' bass — is too disjointed. Face it: in the age of playlists, no one is going to listen to this thing all the way through.

Franz Ferdinand (pictured above) take a different approach with Blood: rather than recruiting a dozen buzz names to sex up Tonight, the band invited album producer Dan Carey to give selected tracks the dub treatment. If the resulting kaleidoscope of free-floating guitars, vocal fragments and echo-chamber drums recalls Mad Professor's elegantly convoluted rework of Massive Attack's Protection, No Protection, that's not entirely coincidence: Carey apprenticed with the respected dub figurehead. Eschewing teenage kicks, Blood invites a less frenetic engagement with the music, extending even to cryptic titles offering little hint as to the versions' respective sources. From the opening squalls to the final, fading echo, it's a surprisingly immersing listen, even (or especially?) for those who aren't necessarily fans of the Glaswegan dandies' jagged guitar sound.

Mark Templeton's Inland similarly gathers its full head of steam from the combustion of rock instrumentation meeting bewildering studio treatments. Electric and acoustic guitars and keening vocal harmonies turn to a fine mist when poured through the Canadian producer's software sieve; it's easy to hear references to Fennesz and Grizzly Bear in the songs' psychedelic high-tide lines, marked by a foamy trail of droning harmonies and glitched artifacts. It's just the latest in a line of excellent releases from New York's Anticipate label, which is responsible for albums from Nicola Ratti, Morgan Packard, Klimek and Ezekiel Honig. From this kind of digitally degraded freak folk to explorations of the Rhodes keyboard at its most liquid, all those releases are well worth your time.