Quiet Village

• Genre: Downtempo

About

In their youth, Matt Edwards and Joel Martin bonded over a mutual passion for record collecting, reeling off rare catalog numbers while driving to raves in the English countryside. As Quiet Village, they may have left the rave behind, but the crate-digger's quest continues to inform what they do. Applying DJ Shadow's cut-and-paste ethos to a Balearic tendency for languid grooves and humid atmosphere, Quiet Village are less composers than expert collagists with an ear exceptionally well tuned for mood.

Outside Quiet Village, Edwards is best known as Radio Slave, one of Europe's techno heavyweights of the late '00s, but before he was banging out after-party anthems, he got his start doing illicit remixes of classic disco and contemporary R&B. Martin honed his curatorial sensibilities working as a sound editor in film; his sound-library research led him to compile the unreleased soundtrack material for George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Appropriately, Quiet Village's music rolls out like a film score, its collisions of fuzz guitar and dub rhythms suggesting the Vaseline-smeared lens work of '70s Swedish soft core -- flowing fields, feathered hair and all.

- Philip Sherburne