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Dig This! School of Seven Bells

FREE DOWNLOAD: School of Seven Bells, "Connjur"

Rhythm and harmony! They’re the first things you hear on “Iamundernodisguise,” the opening track on School of Seven Bells’ debut, Alpinisms: a rolling drumbeat marshals a hint of rhumba in the bassline, while sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza speak-sing the word-sounds like a two-part Eastern Orthodox choir. Soon enough, the chorus brings the hook and the result is left-field electronic pop; but it’s the confident mix of beats and voices that defines the song.

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Concentric Pleasures? Wonky, U Call It?

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Ever since U.K. garage began splintering in the late '90s, its followers have spun off subgenre after subgenre. Dubstep and grime were the first to peel off from UKG, along with short-lived variants like nu dark swing, sub-low and Eski-beat. In the past year and a half, more names have blossomed and spread like Morning Glory vines: bassline house, niche, even the confusingly named "funky." Short for "funky house," it's a post-garage brand of 4/4 dance music that, nevertheless, has little to do with the American dance-music strain widely known as funky house. (In U.K. house music, meanwhile, you also get fidget house and "donk," another head-scratcher of a name that, likewise, refers neither to Soulja Boy's "Donk" nor to minimal house duo Donk Boys.)

Dig This! Curumin

FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD: Curumin, "Compacto"

Curumin is the Quannum artist who shouldn't be. On a Bay Area label of underground rappers, the young man born Luciano Nakata Albuquerque is a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist who doesn't rap and is, in many ways, an old-fashioned songwriter. But when Quannum co-founders Blackalicious toured Brazil in 2004, Curumin's manager slipped his first album, Achados e Perdidos, into their hands, and the group listened. What they heard seriously impressed them: a young man who had Stevie Wonder on the brain, James Brown in the beats and Jorge Ben in the melodies. Shortly after, they signed him.

Two things drive Curumin: a powerful nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood and a voracious appetite for new sounds. JapanPopShow, his second album, is a vintage-era masterpiece. But, for all its diverse influences -- Brazilian pop, soul, funk and reggae  -- it's also a complete musical universe. There are no loose threads. And given how beautifully textured the album is, perhaps it's not surprising he's a Quannum artist -- any hip-hop producer would want to sample these songs. (In fact, several rappers guest on the album.) We caught up with Rhapsody's Dig This! artist in early November, and asked him about all the usual stuff -- the album's name, his inspirations -- but we got a lot more: meditations on youth, our modern world, and what tradition means in the age of globalization.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Concentric Pleasures: New Order's Timely Renewals

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Despite my many obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my fandom has never been particularly fanatical. If I were going to become unhealthily fixated on a single band, though, New Order probably would have been the one, which makes the arrival of double-disc collectors' editions of their five classic '80s albums—Movement, Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, Brotherhood and Technique—particularly welcome. (More obsessive fans than I have complained about audio fidelity problems with the set, but I haven't noticed anything amiss, even playing through what, on my budget, is a rather obscenely expensive pair of Genelec monitors.) Each album is presented in its entirety, subtly remastered, along with rare sides and alternate versions. Some of these, granted, aren't as rare as you might wish; 1987's double-disc Substance did a good job of collecting singles and B-sides like "Shellshock" and "Everything's Gone Green." Still, there's plenty to sink your teeth into, even for semi-completists like myself. And listeners who didn't spend the latter half of the '80s converting their allowance to black wax may find even more surprises. Here's a look at some of the best bits.

Concentric Pleasures: Peacefrog

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

I've been in the mood for a certain strain of '90s electronic music lately. The records I'm thinking of were often considered "home-listening electronica," though they were firmly grounded in the club culture of their day: deep and sensuous, they privileged harmony and melody as much as rhythm, and no matter the techniques they employed—sampling, breakbeats, drum machine sequences, analog synthesizers, digital sound design—they always let the sound itself dictate the final form. If we're going to have a revival of this stuff—and I hope we do—we could do worse by way of preparing than to dig out some of the classics of Peacefrog's catalog. The U.K. label has roamed far and wide since its founding in 1991, moving from acid house to hard techno and on through a range of Detroit and Chicago styles; these days, it's putting out José González and Nouvelle Vague. But there was a moment in the mid-'90s where Peacefrog, along with R&S Apollo, essentially set the standard for deep, emotive techno—to borrow a Black Dog title I cited last week, you could call it "ambiance with teeth."

Concentric Pleasures: The Black Dog

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Also known as Black Dog Productions, the Black Dog came up amidst the crazily productive musical chaos of Sheffield in the early days of rave. Beginning in 1989, they crafted a handful of ambitious, wide-ranging EPs (mostly for GPR and their own eponymous imprint) that incorporated breakbeats and electro-funk into gorgeous, streamlined house and techno in clear debt to Chicago and Detroit. Working with a tidy toolbox, they forged analog synths, drum machines and samplers into a powerful, emotive sound by turns tender and tenacious. (Their track title "Ambience With Teeth" just about sums it up.) By 1993's The Cost EP for GPR and the Bytes album for Warp, their increasingly variable tempos and time signatures would move away from straight techno toward a more fractured, abstract sound. Their approach would eventually come to be known as IDM, or "intelligent dance music"; it's fair to say that along with Autechre and Aphex Twin, the Black Dog round out IDM's Holy Trinity. But they're also the genre's most direct link to another, earlier pantheon: Detroit's first generation of techno producers, whose augmented chords and steely sequences directly informed the Black Dog's melodic sensibilities.

Dig This! Lykke Li, the Dutchess & the Duke, the Mole

Welcome to the October 2008 version of Dig This! Every month, Rhapsody’s editorial staff will introduce you to some artists you may not know, give you a chance to check out their music, and present them in their own words -- watch this space for upcoming features on the individual artists. Oh, and we’ll throw you some free downloads from them, too.

This month in Dig This!:
The Dutchess & the Duke, a couple of kids from Seattle, Washington, who play acoustic guitars and harmonize on tunes that evoke classic mid-‘60s folk-rock, even as they sound utterly modern.

Lykke Li, a young woman from Stockholm, Sweden, whose modern indie-pop is by turns futuristic (dig those electronics), retro (listen to those girl-group song-structures) and quirky as all get-out.

The Mole, an electronic-music producer who came to prominence on Canada’s west coast, but whose melodic yet minimal dance music now fits in perfectly with his adopted hometown of Berlin.

Concentric Pleasures: Freerange Records

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

There often seems to be an aesthetic divide between electronic-music scenes in the U.K. and Germany, but that's not the case with London's Freerange label, co-run by Jamie Odell (aka Jimpster and Audiomontage). The record's early releases drew inspiration from a range of places—Paris, Chicago, Detroit, New York and of course London itself—and carved out a loose, lush sound that ranged from pumping deep house to the off-kilter funk of West London broken beat. Their more recent records, from producers Stimming, pursue the same sense of sumptuousness, but show traces of German minimal techno's precision sonics. (Stimming, appropriately, is from Hamburg; Freerange has also reached out to Finland, Sweden and even Allston, MA in recent A&R efforts.) Despite the fact that the label has been around since 1996, Freerange don't seem to enjoy the profile you might expect, which is odd: after all, you can hear their influence all over the new German deep house being championed by artists like Âme and Dixon. Here, a few choice cuts from the label: for more Freerange, see Square One, Shur-I-Kan and Palm Skin Productions, for starters; for more recent releases, check out Pezzner, Roberto Rodriguez and Manuel Tur, whose Vebanque EP is especially strong.

He Said/She Said: Fall Preview

• Fall Album Preview: 50 Cent, Britney Spears, T.I. & More
• Celebrity News

Summer is but a distant memory. [Sigh.] The temperatures are falling -- and so is your morale. Besides, maybe, Halloween and bloated holiday debt, what else have you to look forward to, you ask? Awesome music, that's what. Myriad releases from the juggernauts of pop will put the kibosh on your Seasonal Affective Disorder -- and nourish your Attention Deficit one. MTV News rundowns what you can expect this autumn -- new releases from T.I., Beyoncé (hallelujah!), Fall Out Boy, Britney (yes, please!), Kanye and more. And while we agree with most of them, we've got a few suggestions, too.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Rhap Session: Morgan Geist

Morgan Geist's disco credentials are solid: Metro Area, his duo with Darshan Jesrani, has spent nearly a decade in the trenches of back-to-the-future dance music, fusing Italo-disco and early electro-pop with elements of Detroit techno. And Geist's label Environ has provided a stable platform for peers like Daniel Wang, Kelley Polar and Baby Oliver to expand upon the music's contemporary possibilities, even as the Unclassics series has revisited (and remixed) some serious rarities.

But Geist, a New Jersey kid who today lives in Queens, is more than a revivalist. He recorded his first EP in 1994, while still a student at Oberlin College, and throughout the late '90s he released a string of powerful-but-understated singles influenced by Detroit techno and early electro-funk; his 1997 debut album, The Driving Memoirs, still sounds ahead of its time today. In recent years, Geist's work has been mostly focused on Metro Area, but this month, he returns with a new album, Double Night Time. Featuring vocals from Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, it is smoother than its predecessor—its funk more sublimated, its palette of rubber and glass far shinier than the scraggy synths and samples of 11 years ago. But it's also darker: for all the disco-ball spangle, the chord changes wrinkle like a furrowed brow, and the lyrics often feel like silver linings around a massing bank of marbled charcoal. Still, there's something undeniably upbeat, even perky about Geist's music, which makes sense. An hour's conversation with the musician reveals one of the most cheerful, or at least charming, neurotics around—something like a dance-music Woody Allen. Exhausted from a weekend dash to finish up a new Metro Area mix for London's Fabric organization—"I've had like four hours of sleep in the last four days," he warns me—Geist weighed in on stressing about being stressed, among other topics.