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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.)

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: Ricardo Villalobos

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.

For many electronic music fans, the Obama win has raised a giddy possibility that, until recently, was all but unthinkable: the return of Ricardo Villalobos to American shores. The Chilean-German producer and DJ has long declared his refusal to visit the United States under the Bush administration, or indeed any subsequent administration continuing Bush's policies. As justification, Villalobos cites his alleged harassment at the hands of immigration officials when passing through U.S. airports shortly after 9/11; the musician, whose family fled Chile after Pinochet's 1973 coup d'etat, claims that the officials interviewing him knew of his family's history and pressed him to explain why they had fled the dictatorship, which in its early years had received CIA support and State Department blessings.

Given Villalobos' round-the-clock, round-the-world schedule, it's well possible he's not even available for inauguration-night raving. But what was once a don't-hold-your-breath scenario has become a bated-breath affair. Here are a few of the releases soundtracking minimal fans' campaign of hope. All serve as reminders that electronic music is only as apolitical as you want it to be.

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.

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.

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.

Concentric Pleasures: Classic By Any Name

by Philip Sherburne

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.

Classic is back! The label, run by Chicago house mainstay Derrick Carter and U.K. house maverick Luke Solomon (of the duo Freaks), shut down in 2005, but not for the usual reasons. Instead, having begun with catalog number 100 and run, via reverse numerical order, down to 000, they pulled the plug on the series, and Classic became what its name had proclaimed all along. Now, finally, the label has made much of its back catalog available digitally. There's a wealth of material to revisit, from the crossover hits (Isolee's "Beau Mot Plage," Blaze's "Lovelee Dae," Markus Nikolai's "Bushes") to powerful, unconventional house tracks from Red Nail, Rob Mello, Gemini, DJ Sneak and many more. Here are a few of my favorites from over the years.

Concentric Pleasures: Feel the Noize

by Philip Sherburne

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.

Alex Ridha's Boysnoize label has just announced its first compilation, the unobtrusively titled BNR Vol. 1. This is welcome news, and not just because it's always fun to see where Paul Snowden (of "Wasted German Youth" and "Minimal My Ass" fame) will take his Futura Bold theme and variations next. (In terms of graphic design, Boysnoize is sort of like the maximal-techno equivalent of Perlon.)

Ridha (who records as Boys Noize) and his label often get lumped in with Ed Banger and their ilk, largely for his fondness for overdriven synthesizers, and the way he makes his tracks seem to heave like a bellows, sucking all the air out of the room with every yawning chord. But Ridha, who hails from Hamburg and lives in Berlin, has a more purist dance-floor instinct than many of his peers: Chicago house and grinding German techno play significant roles in his music, which is as minimalist in its structure as it is maximalist in its attitude. The compilation is due out September 29; read on for some Boys Noize-related highlights to listen to now.

Concentric Pleasures: Summertime and the Raving Is Easy

by Philip Sherburne

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.

Labor Day, schmabor day: heading back to work or school doesn't have to entail a return to real life. For Stateside readers, two September festivals, New York's Minitek and Seattle's Decibel, are about to bookend the country with advanced beats and high spirits. And while Ibiza's summer season is drawing to a close, there's no shortage of high octane tracks to carry us kicking and screaming into the fall, wherever we may be.