During DC’s steamy 1995 summer, Eric Hilton and Rob Garza (a.k.a. Thievery Corporation) took the bumpin’ Eighteenth Street Lounge and went label. An adoration of bossa nova, acid jazz, and breakbeat bred a roster that would include Nicola Conte, Ursula 1000, Thunderball, Federico Aubele, Sofa Surfers, Chris Joss, and Blue States. ESL’s 100th release grooves with powerhouse guest remixers spicing up the imprint’s heavy hitters. Nickodemus (who just joined ESL), Boca 45, Beatfanatic, Bombay Dub Orchestra, and Medeski Martin & Wood (among others) do the redux with heapin’ helpings of bass, breaks, and funkification, and a lovely glaze of deep house.
Thunderball Cinescope
DC’s Thunderball rolls out their third offering, harvesting from spy cinema, Vegas, Brazil, funk, and dub, and treating listeners to collabos with Afrika Bambaataa and See-I’s Roots and Zeebo. Loads of beats with multitudinous samples will feel comfy to some and clichéd to others. Either way, this is fine fodder for chic hotel bars or jetsetters’ lounges. Thunderball stands in good stead with labelmates Thievery Corporation, and if you dig Groove Armada, Cinescope can share shelf or ‘Pod space without a fight.
Max Richter Songs From Before
As an acclaimed contemporary composer, Max Richter has shown an impressive consistency in the quality of his work. Following 2004’s The Blue Notebooks and his production work on folkie Vashti Bunyan’s acclaimed Lookaftering, Songs From Before is a fitting next chapter in his career. Building off the format of Notebooks, Songs From Before pairs Richter’s warm piano compositions with readings of text written by novelist Haruki Murakami. And with its string section and carefully employed radio hiss, Songs From Before,/i> is a deeply moving, near-sacred work.
Sun OK Papi K.O. Orchestre Philharmonok
Formerly one half of Scratch Pet Land, Laurent Baudoux is currently slated for world domination with his full-length debut as solo alias Sun OK Papi K.O. The musical equivalent of an all-night Dr. Mario party, Orchestre Philharmonok is the most bizarre fun you can have this year. From the 8-bit synths to the cut-up guitar fragments to the grimy verses from Japan’s MC Illreme, Philharmonok is the sort of innocent amusement that’s impossible to critique. Call it sound collage, call it glitch… no one cares. This is music for dancing, grinning, and laughing to.
Stephen Brodsky’s Octave Museum Stephen Brodsky’s Octave Museum
Unlike his day job fronting proto-metalcore giants Cave-In, Stephen Brodsky’s work in Octave Museum sees the artist completely ditching aggression in favor of mid-tempo pop songs. Some tracks, such as opener “Voice Electric,” pan out decently, offering a suave Deerhoof falsetto and some snazzy guitar work. More often than not, however, the record emulates bad ’90s alterna-pop like Dandy Warhols (“Sentimental Case,” “Kid Defender”). There are definitely some decent ideas on this record, but none good enough to merit wide release on a label as renowned as Hydra Head.
Gyptian My Name Is
It was only two years ago that roots crooner I-Wayne was being hailed as the future of reggae, but an uneven album didn’t equal the promise of a couple of hot singles. Like I-Wayne, Gyptian frequently employs falsetto voce to carry across conscious themes, yet My Name Is rests on a solid red-gold-and-green bedrock-it would be an above-average album even without the instant classic “Serious Times.” DJ Flavor’s riddims continue dancehall’s retro-influenced trend with rub-a-dub bubblers and meditative nyahbinghi drumming, while Gyptian alternates between two personas: common man in love and concerned Rasta.
Tommy Guererro From the Soil to the Soul
Former teenage skate sensation Tommy Guererro has long since moved into a second career, making hard-to-define music that traces lazy patterns through the realms of indie rock, dub, downtempo, and soul. From the Soil to the Soul stands as his finest effort to date. Earlier albums sounded experimental, yet unfocused; here, Tommy G’s spacey, multifaceted sound gets some gravitas. It still meanders a bit, zig-zagging instead of traveling from point A to point B, but there’s a sense that Guererro knows where he wants to lead you. Perfect for 3 a.m. stargazing, with a bit of prime-time partying thrown in.
Johann Johannsson IBM 1401, A User’s Manual
On IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson creates an elegy not only to the first (relatively affordable) mass-produced digital, all-transistorized business computer but also implicitly to his father Johann Gunnarsson, a maintenance engineer who managed to coax sounds out of the machine, despite it not being built for this purpose. When the machine was withdrawn from service in 1971, its “music” was played for a final time and documented on tape. Three and a half decades later, Johannsson has (via a 60-piece string orchestra) recorded his responses to these melodies, finding beauty in the limited audio emissions of the five-foot-high grey machine. The occasional deployment of a mid-’60s maintenance instruction tape is a little grounding (kitschy, even) but otherwise IBM 1401, A User’s Manual is a touching and very lovely album indeed.
Hey Willpower Pda
Even the most profoundly idiotic black-out drunkenness results in some small lesson learned. And with the perspective gained by electroclash’s final, much-anticipated demise, we can now shamelessly enjoy-without the least bit of irony-the merits of a record like Hey Willpower’s PDA. The San Francisco group, made up of former Imperial Teen singer Will Schwartz and producer Tomo, is unabashedly pious to Prince, Cameo, and other icons of the eclectronic ’80s, when electro, freestyle, and pop gleefully top-rocked in sweat-drenched unison. Like devout contemporaries The National Trust and Chromeo, Schwartz references “Cars That Go Boom”-not in an ironic, white-label mash-up kind of way, but more as an homage by someone who actually rocked the original in a parking lot 20 years ago. At least, we hope that’s the reason.
Fat Jon & Styrofoam Same Channel
Once a member of Cincinnati’s Five Deez, Fat Jon is the foremost evangelist of extraterrestrial hip-house, with an immediately recognizable patois that spans the Atlantic. Belgian melan-tronica architect Arne Van Petegem (a.k.a. Styrofoam) represents the emotive sensibility and clever production that defines the Morr Music imprint. As a duo, the two deftly weave their art and craft together, retaining their strengths while creating an even more taut and accessible whole. An experimental, courageous, and wildly successful coupling of styles.
