Few besides Burial could come up with a two-track single with a total running time of over 25 minutes. Even more unusually, both songs break down into discrete movements separated by a moment of silence. The dropouts initially seem distracting, but they soon become part of the fabric of the music, as significant as Burial's trademark hiss and clatter. Despite the legions of imitators to spring up in Burial's wake, no one else has mastered the same mix of moody and murky, and here he's at his best, with melodies like ivy sprung from cracked pavement, nurtured by nothing but tears.
Germany's Pantha du Prince has always loved his bell tones, but he really indulges his yen for hammered bronze on Elements of Light, an album based primarily on the carillon, a ringing behemoth of an instrument whose roots go back to the Middle Ages. Layered with additional chimes and mallet percussion, this five-track suite combines the meditative resonance of a European church with the bubbling pulse and spine-tingling sonics of avant-garde techno.
How long before some bright mixologist -- that's a bartender, not a DJ -- comes up with a cocktail called the Toro y Moi? (Ingredients TBD, but it's got to come with a slice of lime, a drink umbrella and a drop of pure, distilled sunshine.) Chaz Bundick's third album is much of a piece with his first two; it channels the Beach Boys, Steely Dan and Dilla into easygoing mood music that's more substantial than it seems at first blush. Beneath the lulled synths, the laidback beats and his deceptively sweet falsetto, these songs have teeth. Make it a double, and savor the bite.
If FaltyDL's third album sounds sweeter than its predecessors, that has something to do with the fact that he fell in love while making the record; songs like "She Sleeps" and "Straight & Arrow" transmit a sense of comfort that we've rarely heard from the restless Brooklyn producer. But the deeper love story here is his ongoing affair with classic house and breakbeat hardcore. His paean to dance music's golden age is filled with longing, but it's never retro. Instead, Hardcourage is a soul-baring missive to dance music's creative and emotive potential.
Long before he became Professor Genius, Jorge Velez toiled away in his New York apartment on a modest setup of analog synthesizers and drum machines, making, well, left-field techno, retro-futurist house and discombobulated dance music that's much of a piece with Professor Genius' sui generis sound. What blows the mind is that these tracks were made between 1996 and 1999. Sounding little like anything from the U.S. then, they constitute a missing link between '80s Detroit and the next century's Mars colony, lo-fi but wide-eyed. Our trip to the stars will be fueled by basement genius.
After a debut album sourced from the beatless interstices of old jungle mixtapes, Lee Gamble returns with an even more engrossing exploration of the gray area between head and body music. Like Actress, Gamble favors degraded sound sources swathed in tape warble and YouTube hiss -- bell tones and queasy synths are slowed, screwed and stewed into an uneasy gloop, while pings and chirps sketch the outline of techno at its most skeletal. It's as abstract as an equation and as visceral as hunger.
As synaesthetic aliases go, it's hard to beat Heathered Pearls, Jakub Alexander's opalescent, texturally obsessed ambient project for Ghostly. His beatless loops of synthesizer and found sound have a matte, static feel at first, but the longer you let them play out, the more the details come to life. Brian Eno is an obvious influence, and so are the rich, electro-acoustic sounds of Loscil and Markus Guentner, who both contribute remixes. The best kind of background music, it colors the environment around you; it requires little in terms of engagement, but rewards handsomely.
Ethernet -- synth voyager Tim Gray -- hails from Syracuse and lives in Portland, Oregon; from his music, it's evident that he knows dark and cold. Like 144 Pulsations of Light, Opus 2 goes in hard on deep, droning analog synthesizers; it manages to be simultaneously as reassuring as a stack of wool blankets and as chilly as the wind it keeps at bay. Ghostly techno rhythms occasionally come to the surface, recalling Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, and the fleeting glimmer of light gestures hopefully back towards Cocteau Twins.
Plenty of artists pay lip service to house music as a vehicle for spiritual transcendence. The Crystal Ark do more than that; without sermonizing, they make getting down feel as serious as communion and as jubilant as a revival meeting. Building on the programmed drums and skeletal synth-funk of early house music, and calling down catharsis in chanted vocals in English and Spanish, they imbue their percussive frug with a healthy dose of loose-limbed improv. It's a rough-edged brand of ecstasy attuned to wide horizons and the soft earth underfoot.
The idea of a synthesizer virtuoso might not evoke the most appealing imagery, given its associations of prog-rock excess. Fortunately, Daniel Lopatin leaves out the solo pyrotechnics and white spandex in these gorgeous analog fantasias. Collected from various out-of-print releases, the tracks on Rifts range from arpeggiated studies in pulse minimalism to droning ambient soundscapes, pretty enough to qualify as new age and gritty enough to reveal Lopatin's roots in the noise underground. Fans of Klaus Schulze, Steve Reich and Boards of Canada will find plenty to get lost in here. (This 2013 reissue adds even more rarities to the sprawling, lysergic compendium.)
