London's DVA (Leon Smart, aka Scratcha DVA) has come a long way from the grime scene's blips and brittle sonics. His debut album for Hyperdub delves deeply into lush, dazzling techno soul, drawing elements from U.K. funky and '90s broken beat to create a sound that's his alone. Guest vocalists like Fatima and Vikter Duplaix help shape the album's melodic dimensions, while DVA dedicates himself to contorted funk rhythms and super-saturated tone color. Knotty and occasionally counterintuitive, it's a welcome counterpoint to cookie-cutter club productions.
Brendan M. Gillen's Interdimensional Transmissions label brought us some of the defining records of electro's late-'90s revival, but this EP with Detroit's Derek Plaslaiko taps a very different kind of vibe, with gravelly, torpid beats in place of sprightly laser zaps. As with i-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass," there's a dark sense of humor at work, as a gas-station Lothario growls pitched-down come-ons (in between dissing Girl Talk and bigging up Drexciya). Skeletal dub remixes and paranoid analog fugues round out this creepily compelling slab of weirdo techno.
Belle and Sebastian return to the Late Night Tales series with their second selection of left-field indie, electronica and world music. They tap an unusually broad range of styles, from Broadcast's lilting pop to Mulatu Astatke's Ethiopian jazz; there's also David Behrman's 1970s proto ambient, classic soul from Blood, Sweat & Tears, and even a spoken-word conclusion read by music scribe Paul Morley. Throughout, they manage to find a common thread linking even the most disparate entries, dreamy, hushed and a little melancholic. You only wish you had friends who made you mixtapes like this.
After six years of releasing singles, Ed Davenport finally tries his hand at the full-length format. It sure doesn't sound like a debut: Stylistically, Davenport sticks to house and techno of a classic bent, but he avoids the pitfalls of so many "dance" albums by keeping the palette varied and the moods nicely nuanced. There are flashbacks to Chicago, Detroit and New York as well as nods to the darker, tougher sounds of his adopted Berlin, interspersed with ambient interludes and studies in Rephlex's early '90s brand of bedroom rave. Bring on the follow-up.
There's lots of latent energy in Battles' music: All that snap and twang soaks up force like a coiled spring, which makes remixing them an interesting proposition. How do you re-animate music that's already so alive? Several of the remixers here practice a kind of reverse alchemy, taking Battles' brilliant baubles and melting them down into sullen gray lumps of techno. Others lead Battles stylistically far afield, as with Kode9's bright, bumpy U.K. funky, while Qluster turn the carnivalesque "Dominican Fade" into a lilting ballad somewhere between Kraftwerk and Jon Hassell.
Petar Dundov's sophomore album finds the Croatian producer continuing his mission to rescue trance from its kandi-raver connotations. Drawing from Krautrock, ambient, techno and disco, he sculpts layers of synthesizer into immersive, slowly evolving soundscapes that reference both Vangelis and Carl Craig. The album's sequencing flows as smoothly as the individual tracks, rewarding both deep and distracted listening, but "Silent Visitor" is the clear highlight, bubbling with energy and unusual tone color.
Chris Clark came up on Warp during IDM's heyday, but the British producer's music was never reducible to glitch clichés. On his sixth album in 11 years, he proves again how little genres matter, combining '60s-riffing pop, Radiophonic Workshop warble and contorted breakbeats. At his most melodic, he recalls label-mates Broadcast and Bibio, but he frames his ditties in Krautrock-y swathes of electronic and electro-acoustic sound. Despite its complexity, this is profoundly easy listening: a wash of organic colors that, on closer inspection, gives way to Fibonacci swirl.
Brighton's Slugabed delights in a particularly fluorescent strain of 21st century G-funk, in which neon arpeggios go zippering across the stereo field and hydraulic beats leave the listener dangling in mid-air. "Sex" is a kind of circus electro, complete with sad clowns; "Molecules" feels like burrowing into a game of Dig Dug in 3D. Daedelus' remix of "Sex" is stately and a little hangdog, with a resigned kind of beauty; Groundislava turns the same song into a dewy-eyed tribute to Aphex Twin.
Junior Boys, Simian Mobile Disco and Martin Gore are all converts to the cult of modular synthesis; so is Philadelphia's King Britt, appearing on Kode 9's Hyperdub label as Fhloston Paradigm. A far cry from the former Digable Planets member's habitual deep house and soul, these three tracks are all unstable squelch and tinny machine rhythms, broken and volatile. "The Chase" is a labyrinth lined with steel-trap beats and sad, flickering neon, like a kind of steam-punk Giorgio Moroder; the pulsing "Lilloo's Seduction" is an afternoon nap stretched to infinity.
