Recently in Concentric Pleasures Category

There are three really cool things about my job. One of them is getting to turn people on to the music I'm most jazzed about: it's a license to pontificate, really -- a pulpit for strictly musical evangelism. But, recognizing that my own tastes can be, shall we say, peculiar, I also try to listen with open ears and the humble reminder that what doesn't float my boat (a rather cramped dinghy, it sometimes appears) may carry another listener's craft all the way to shore. They talk about the critic's role as a "filter," but I'm really more like a theater usher, lighting your way to the appropriate aisle.

The likely pick for my favorite album of 2009 is looking to be the self-titled debut from the xx, a co-ed London quartet of 20-year-olds whose self-produced album is a masterpiece of sensuality and restraint. Even I'm surprised at my enthusiasm for the record: it doesn't necessarily reach out and grab you on first listen, favoring atmospheres over hooks and suggestion over immediacy. Still, I have a hard time listening to it only once in a given sitting (one of the pleasures of a 39-minute album).

One of the things I like about the record is how it distills so many influences into such a simple, unassuming form: there's a vintage rock 'n' roll patina borrowed from Sun Studios-era Elvis and, less authentically vintage, Chris Isaak's "Wicked Games" (which serves as the barely disguised foundation for the xx's "Infinity"). The welling bass is reminiscent of dubstep and UK garage, and the sullen ambiance recalls post-punk and early goth; the song structures suggest the molasses Americana of Galaxie 500 and their protégés, like Low, Yo La Tengo and Mazzy Star.

The more you listen, the more references you can spot, floating like drops of oil on the surface of the xx's inky, glistening infusion. Since I can't just keep listening to their album on a constant loop (can I?), I put together a playlist that pulls together a number of possible xx influences—as well as a few contemporaries who achieve a similarly dark, viscous bliss in their music—including all the above plus Slowdive, Hugo Largo, David Bowie, Massive Attack, David Sylvian, Cocteau Twins, Seefeel, Brian Eno and many, many more. Listen to a sampling below, and check out the whole playlist here at Rhapsody's Playlist Central.

The fall release schedule has kicked in, in earnest, and the electronic-music world is humming like an overheated Theremin. From Basement Jaxx' cyborg pop to the nether reaches of the underground, here's a selection of recent records that don't require a PhD in electronic subgenres to appreciate.

You have to give DFA credit for not resting on their laurels. The label's a figurehead of this decade's indie-dance scene, with an almost unnervingly astute sense for the nuances of 21st-century cool. And yet, aside from certain hallmarks of the DFA style -- ropy bass lines, disaffected vocals, judicious use of cowbell -- they have yet to settle into a pattern. (Black Meteoric Star's psychedelic, home-soldered acid house isn't exactly par for the indie course.)

Their habit of reaching outside their own scene when commissioning remixes is equally commendable. In addition to marquis names like Soulwax and Franz Ferdinand, DFA also tap artists -- like Carl Craig, Baby Ford and Luomo -- who resonate with house and techno die-hards, but have little foothold in American indie circles. It's not just a question of credibility; the stream of new input keeps DFA's mutable sound continually refreshed.

A stellar new collection of remixes of LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, James Murphy's Nike-sponsored album from 2006, is a case in point. Theo Parrish, Prins Thomas, Runaway, Trus'Me, Prince Language, Padded Cell, Pilooski and Riley Reinhold all take the ball and run as far as they can, touching down everywhere from Detroit downbeat to Norwegian disco. Read on for a rundown of the parties involved, with recommendations for further listening from each.

 

El Guincho (photo: Oliver Faig)

This week's column has no explicit theme, but there might be an implicit one: all five of these albums explore what happens when you combine traditional acoustic and electric instruments with electronic processing and production. Three of them make heavy use of vocals. Four are new, another is a decade old, and one of them sounds way older -- in a good way.

El Guincho, "Antillas" remixes: EP1 and EP2

El Guincho's music is so full of energy and ideas, it's often hard to believe that it's the work of a single artist: listening to his 2008 debut, Alegranza, feels like standing on a hilltop equidistant from three or four different stages at a world music fest, with soca, Afropop, tropicalia and psychedelic rock swirling in the air and shifting with the winds. Now the Spanish musician has reissued "Antillas," one of the album's standout tracks, to a diverse crew of remixers who take his ideas even farther afield. Most of them stay true to the sunny-day spirit of the original, homing in on Highlife-inspired guitars and delirious, Animal Collective-styled chants. Spank Rock's XXXchange comes up with a dazzling slab of Technicolor exuberance in the spirit of DFA or Carl Craig. Norway's Prins Thomas, a master of hypnotic disco, seems to have come across a few of the helium-fueled balloons that once floated above the floor of David Mancuso's Loft; full of bluegrass guitar and manic hand claps, it's as unstoppable as a five-year-old's birthday party. Cee, of Germany's dub outfit Al-Haca, takes the opposite approach, layering atonal voices over quavering bass and stripped-down percussion halfway between dubstep and the bleakest techno: it's "Antillas" all right, but as heard from the other end of a black hole.

 

Sally Shapiro

Summer's all but officially over, and boy does it feel like it. These three albums may be grounded in libidinal sounds like disco and punk, but there's nevertheless something coolly distant, even alienating about them. (That's part of their charm.) They might make for an entirely unscientific sampling of the current indie dance landscape, but from their heightened affect to their stylistic feints, I think all three speak to a creeping sense of anxiety in the pop underground, both explicit and unconscious.

Sally Shapiro, My Guilty Pleasure

If the term "ice princess" wasn't invented for Sally Shapiro, it's entirely possible she was invented for it. (And she is, let's not forget, an invention: Sally Shapiro is only the nom de microfon of a Swedish shrinking violet whose real name, she demurs, is "something else.") Even singing songs like "Love in July," she sounds about as summery as a steel-blue shock of glacier: her breathy, oddly translucent voice rises up from the mix like the vapors from a frostbitten kiss. Of course, much of the credit for My Guilty Pleasure's deep-freeze aesthetic goes to producer Johan Agebjörn, whose Italo-disco-inspired arpeggios feel as sharply limned as the edges of a snowflake. All the gleaming surfaces can get a bit dizzying after a while -- Royksopp's Junior, a similar attempt at cryogenic disco, sounds positively tropical in comparison -- but there's a thawing respite in the trance-tossed "Dying in Africa," which summons visions of the Field's disappearing horizons.

YACHT, See Mystery Lights

YACHT's full-length DFA debut sounds almost like the work of a different band than the one responsible for I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real. On the Portland, Ore., band's new album Psychic City, the skittery electronic touches of earlier albums cede the center ground to more muscular guitar-drums-and-bass arrangements. Instead of sketching around the outlines of pop, Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans now home in on the shape of their songs in bold strokes. YACHT aren't shy about their magpie tendencies: "Pyschic City" and "It's Boring" take cues from the Pixies and Pylon, while more futuristic joints like "I'm in Love with a Ripper" open their arms wide to encompass '80s synth-pop and '00s R&B, via ZTT-inspired sampling and delirious flights of Auto-Tune. (There's even a trace of the Durutti Column in the limpid guitars of the opening "Ring the Bell.") It's far more engaging than fellow Portlanders Glass Candy, whose No Wave disco wants for YACHT's irreverent, inquisitive spirit. From the low-slung bass to Evans' slouchy delivery, the album's a no-brainer fit for DFA, currently running this corner of the indie dance scene. But despite the obligatory grounding in the punkier side of disco, it still sounds unlike anything else on the label.

Health, Get Color

Health's machinic rhythms and queasy oscillators, laced with digital tics and freaky effects, draw an imaginary line from Sonic Youth's swollen amplifiers to the nether space of the motherboard. Like Liars, Animal Collective and Battles, the L.A. band pulls at rock's ragged edges in both style and sonics. The new album, Get Color, is both heavier and trickier than their debut: songs like "Death+" sound like a cross between Helmet and Aphex Twin -- part death march, part angels' chorus. The band's tendency to lock into a trance-inducing churn sometimes leaves you wishing for more in the way of songwriting; maybe that last, as-yet-untaken leap is what gives the music such a palpable sense of struggle -- witness the fiery permutations of "We Are Water," where the band wrestles with the ghosts of prog rock, hardcore and techno; the song's imbued with a sense of almost incendiary frustration as it twists and turns.

August is a slow month for record releases, so I thought I'd highlight some upcoming news. Don't worry, we've got plenty of new music for you as well -- scroll down for a playlist featuring the Hyperdub debut of Global Communication's Mark Pritchard and Sa-Ra's Om'mas Keith; breakbeat maven Si Begg and bleep veterans Unique 3; an Autechre new remix of the Black Dog; offbeat house from Who Made Who and DJ Koze; a new Boys Noize-approved banger from D.I.M.; club-ready remixes of classic Fatboy Slim; a brief introduction to the Troubled Mind of the Gaslamp Killer, the newest signing to Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint; and a new track from downtempo stalwarts Zero 7.

Grizzly Bear by Tom Hines

As you may have noticed, I've been on something of a Warp kick lately. To me, Warp will always be first and foremost an "electronic" imprint -- after all, the label served as my main introduction to contemporary electronic music 15 years ago, via Autechre's Amber and then other Warp artists like Aphex Twin. (I wrote at some length about my first encounter with Warp eight years ago, when the label's cofounder Rob Mitchell passed away; you can read that piece here.)

But in recent years, Warp has arguably had its most surprising successes outside electronica, in hip-hop, avant-pop and indie rock. I've already talked about Jamie Lidell, Battles and Flying Lotus. Here are a few more crucial albums from the guitar-wielding weirdos warping Warp's aesthetic in wild, white-knuckled ways.

England's Warp label achieved its crossover status -- bridging the worlds of hardcore bleepheads and, you know, normal people -- thanks to a roster filled with names like Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73 and Boards of Canada, artists adept at combining electronic mischief with broad pop instincts. (What else could explain the way that Jamie Lidell went from playing abandoned buildings to opening for Elton John?) But Warp, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, hasn't quit tickling the fringes of modern music. Consider these artists the conductors on the label's regular shuttle to the outer limits. Who knows: they might just become its next big names.

Mira Calix
Warp's resident conceptualist, producer/composer Mira Calix uses the stuff of everyday life as her inspiration and source material: car horns, insect flutter, the ambient buzz of wide-open, rural spaces. She mixes these with vintage synthesizers and odd electronic gizmos as well as piano, cello and other acoustic instruments. The Elephant in the Room: 3 Commissions collects work commissioned for gallery installations and contemporary opera, but don't let that scare you off: heard at home, these quiet, patient soundscapes subtly color everything around you.

Jackson and His Computer Band
Around the time that Justice were starting to take off, another Frenchman released an album that shared many of the Ed Banger duo's characteristics: blistering distortion, shuddering rhythms, church choirs, bloody synths. But Smash doesn't beat listeners over the head the way Justice do; its disco breaks and electro synths are tempered by brooding moods and cottony ambiance.

Jamie Lidell

What do hypersoul crooner Jamie Lidell, futuristic beatsmith Flying Lotus and psychedelic math-rockers Battles have in common? Aside from their shared penchant for turning traditional forms inside out, and the ability of all three artists to combine experimental-music rigor with refreshing good cheer, they all make their homes on Warp, the iconic U.K. label that turns 20 this year. Despite a roster heavy on electronic agents provocateur like Aphex Twin and Autechre, no single sound dominates Warp's catalog, which ranges from bleepy electronica to mind-bending hip-hop to smart, snappy rock 'n' roll. Here are 10 Warp artists you need to hear now.

Daft Punk tower over their indie dance acolytes like, well, a giant, gleaming pyramid. So it's only appropriate that some starry-eyed statesiders would eventually borrow not only the French duo's filters, but even one of their album titles. That would be Discovery, perhaps better known as the duo comprised of Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles. (Perhaps to compensate, they named their debut album simply LP.) Their buzzing, gleaming layers of filtered synthesizers would be unthinkable without Daft Punk's influence, but they take just as much inspiration from contemporary R&B, favoring jiggling, syncopated drum-machine beats and scads of breathless falsetto, often run through vocal effects like Auto-Tune. At their best, as on "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," they remind me of Hot Chip or even His Name Is Alive's experiments in electronic R&B; elsewhere, as on the highly questionable Jackson 5 cover "I Want You Back," an instinctive indie aversion to execution saps the force from their music, rendering it kitschier than it probably wants to be.

Irony Doesn't Kill People, Curmudgeons Do
Being allergic to most things ironic, I half-expected to get some kind of rash from rubbing up too close to Guns Don't Kill People, Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch's kinda-sorta concept album about a one-armed commando from Jamaica named Major Lazer. (It's all very Gorillaz meets, oh, I don't know, Dr. Alimantado or something, or Rex the Dog meets rockers uptown.) But the record's actually kind of awesome. The first track alone features surf guitar; horse whinneys and clip-clopping hooves; Nokia ringtones; cash-register bells; a hyperactive Santigold loop; and gruff, absurdist chat from Mr. Lex. The album's first half offers a solid stretch of dancehall bangers and earnest lovers' rock; Major Lazer achieve genius with "Baby," a 67-second sketch featuring the roly-poly-voiced Prince Zimboo waxing philosophical to a newborn. (The baby has "built-in Auto-Tune," wouldn't you know.) For all the goofiness, Diplo and Switch flex considerable muscle with tracks like the supercolliding "Anything Goes" and the martial, minimalist "Pon De Floor." To make the latter beat, one imagines the producers having rigged up a Whac-a-Mole game with those toy cans that moo when turned upside down. As The Hudsucker Proxy's Norville Barnes would say, "You know, for kids."

Phoenix are a pop band, plain and simple: a little bit Sloan, a little bit Fleetwood Mac and a little bit Daft Punk. At least, it feels like there's an unmistakably "electronic" element to the French band's records, even if it's just something about the goose-pimply detailing of their sound. (That could also describe the Fleetwood Mac influence, of course.) In any case, they take it back to the dance floor with a new set of "Lisztomania" remixes for Kitsune, the French label that recently released Phoenix's odd, appealing Kitsune Tabloid mix CD.

DFA's Holy Ghost! do a kind of chugging arpeggio thing that sounds an awfully lot like their own song "I Will Come Back." (Like their label mates Hercules & Love Affair and Black Meteoric Star, they clearly love old house and disco, but their take on it is way glossier.) LA's Classixx give blips their due on a spacy, slow-motion remix, and Manchester's Der Die Das dig into a gooey techno groove that reminds me the slightest bit of old Laurent Garnier. None of them are a patch on the original, nor for that matter upon Phoenix's recent album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which is very good indeed, if you like that kind of thing. (By "that kind of thing," of course, I mean sunny-day singalong guitar pop that sounds like it's been squeezed from a tube full of rainbows and honey -- and who doesn't like that?)

In other recent indie/dance crossover releases, Strangelets (Supersoul Recordings' Xaver Naudascher and David Ducaruge) remix two of Sebastien Tellier's recent hits, gussying them up in tumbling, Italo-inspired arpeggios stretched to nearly eight minutes apiece. "Sexual Sportswear" is particularly good: brittle, pumping and moody. And, refreshingly, done without a trace of irony: these bleeps mean business.

Fever Ray's "Triangle Walks" is the new single from the Knife's Karin Dreijer-Andersson, and a diverse crew tests its malleable mettle. Tiga's is the oddball of the bunch, a low-slung electro number with booming 808s and a Neptunes infatuation. Elsewhere we find brooding downtempo (Ben Hoo), steely minimal techno (Spektre, Allez-Allez) and stately synth-pop (Tora Vintner, James Rutledge). Despite the stylistic range, they tend to bleed together under the weight of Dreijer-Andersson's almost overpoweringly processed vocals. Maybe that's why Allez-Allez's remix -- which all but erases them, stripping back the vocal track to a lone, repeated tone -- is one of the EP's most successful.

Finally, Moby has a new album out; following just a little over a year after Last Night, Wait for Me plots a considerably different course. While its predecessor was an uptempo celebration of New York's downtown dance legacy, the new one eases into a cozy, intimate vibe that's flush with guitars and vocals. Angelo Badalamenti, Beth Orton and maybe even Mazzy Star all serve as inspiration at different points across an album whose only real constant is its warmth. Taking a few cues from Joy Division (via Interpol), "Mistake" is fine, brooding guitar rock, while "Scream Pilots" sounds almost as though it might be a Plugz outtake from the Repo Man soundtrack. The album's best moments are its short, spontaneous instrumentals, fleeting moments when a musical idea flashes up in a smoke of tube glow and tape hiss, and is gone.

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 Süd 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.

Photo by Sabine Mirlesse

Purple is gaining traction. No, I don't mean that Caterpillar has released a line of pastel backhoes. Rather, a handful of slippery synaesthetes on dubstep's margins have fixed upon the term to describe their garish perversions of the form. Throwing fluorescent G-funk leads over swollen, drunken drum programming, these mischievous types excel at combining brash hooks with beats that happily flaunt dubstep convention; with their video-game blips and almost comical riffs, they turn rebellion into child's play.

The Guardian's Dan Hancox recently profiled the Bristol trio leading the lilac revolution: Gemmy, Guido and Joker. Gemmy's recent "Supligen" single offers a good approximation of the form. Steeped in 8-bit blips, it stacks cheap, buzzy synth lines one atop the other until they mass into something almost rich, like creamed plastic. Neither beat on the record is quite as out-there as the pulses conjured by artists like Untold and Ramadanman (both of whom you can hear on the ~scape label's Round Black Ghosts). But there's a cheeky insouciance to his cadence, which goes glide, glide, splat over and over.

The label responsible, Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu, is a major force behind some of the most exciting sounds in "bass music" right now. Planet Mu has been tossing spanners in the breakbeat works for 14 years, across jungle, breakcore, IDM and grime. With recent releases from Boxcutter, Pinch, Neil Landstrumm, Jamie Vex'd and others, it has paralleled the elliptical orbit of Kode9's Hyperdub label around the outer edges of dubstep's stratosphere. New Yorker FaltyDL is the latest to enter the fold, and his Love Is a Liability is a corker, encompassing fizzy 2-step skip, smothering bass, melancholic sampladelia and synth melodies that verge on the baroque. As with Burial or Landstrumm, there's a palpable sense of nostalgia on tracks like the garage-y "Human Meadow" and "Dionysos," but like those artists, he's got a way with blending sound that's all his own. Just listen to "Enuia," which splits the difference between Rephlex and ECM in its water-drop rhythms and billowing acoustic ambiance.

FaltyDL's Human Meadow Remixes EP is also worth your time. Boxcutter, Luke Vibert and Mu-Ziq (aka label boss Mike Paradinas) all deliver radically different reworks, from Vibert's unabashed acid-house/Italo-disco mashup to Boxcutter's glazed rainbow crumble. (Honestly, I don't know what to call it; it sounds like the kind of music that, in the future, will serenade spaceship greenhouses, the 23rd-century equivalent of Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants, perhaps). But my favorite is Mu-Ziq's remix, which employs a breakbeat so slow, you'd be reaching for the 33/45 switch if you were listening to vinyl. Lush, dubby synth bass saunters beneath like a cat rubbing table legs, and sped-up vox are run through cistern reverb, with a net effect akin to floating in space, filled with helium yourself.

For all these and more recent Planet Mu madness, check the playlist below.