As she approaches a level of crossover appeal that escapes most drum & bass artists, Reid Speed unsurprisingly takes the catch-all approach on her current mix-project, Life After Dark. Maneuvering through nitty-gritty Dylan rinseouts as expertly as she bounces with Mathematics and Total Science rollers, Reid provides an instant snapshot of the scene from top to bottom with a nod to the dancefloor that is instantly contagious. While the mix may lack a level of cohesion to the expert eye, Life After Dark provides an ideal environment for potential neophytes to dig deeper into drum & bass arcana.
Mark Farina Air Farina
Mark Farina, best known for his role as master shaman of the Mushroom Jazz chronicles, delivers his long-overdue debut that, as expected, is nothing short of superb. Interspersed with the cross-talk and chatter of a transatlantic flight, the album unfolds at a steady pace as Farina works things out on both the physical and mental level, grooving a solid course through instrumental hip-hop, jazzy soul and hypnotizing house. Touching base with fellow spacewalkers Kaskade, Lance Desardi and People Under The Stairs, Farina unhinges the architecture of flight and launches the listener into a place far more ethereal and yet oh-so-real. Leave your seatbelt off for this one.
Richard Devine Asect: Dsect
As valorous as any release you’ll hear all year, Richard Devine’s third album opens with the sounds of a ghost being squeezed into a machine, an appropriately ghastly introduction to the eerie journey ahead. Long revered for his technical mastery, the Atlanta native flexes his compositional flair here, inserting lovely melodies between his patented postindustrial eruptions. “Rusx Fee” stands out: a scabrous concatenation of breakbeats and laser stabs that will make you swear Richard D. James is in the building. The comparison to Aphex Twin is not made lightly-with Asect: Dsect, Devine accedes to the league of legends.
Ursulal Rucker Silver Or Lead
This Philly native’s sophomore album has an admirable aural scope, featuring beats from respected producers in the fields of nu-jazz (Jazzanova), house (Lil’ Louie Vega) and hip-hop (The Roots). Rucker’s poetics are consistently incisive, testifying to the black female experience in these turbulent times. The standout track here is “Untitled Flow,” wherein the vocalist rides King Britt’s echo-laden electro backing and defiantly reminds us that her “rhyme is sweet but deadly.” Maybe so, but Rucker’s phrasing is frustratingly uniform, devoid of riddimological quirks and emotional inflection. In Foxy Brown’s hands, Rucker’s revolutionary words would uplift the masses.
Rechenzentrum Director’s Cut
The pleasures in German multimedia collective Rechenzentrum’s music aren’t to be found in the structure-shifting, ambient dub-techno configurations long familiar from generations of German electronic music-but in the details, where pianos drizzle over grayscale waveform mountain ranges, rumbling bass wreaks seismic havoc, and scraps of melody flit across the sound field like radio transmissions in search of a way home. It sounds a bit like a distillation of the last five years of glitch techno-except, curiously, much better than the sum of its parts. There’s a depth and a richness here that’s absent from most laptop wankery; instead of silicon myopia, Rechenzentrum’s perspective looks past the motherboard and out onto a world of startling life and color.
Matthew Dear Leave Luck to Heaven
Gone are the days when US fans of minimal techno and microhouse had to emigrate to Montreal or Berlin to keep up with the state of the genre. We’ve got our very own hero in Ann Arbor’s Matthew Dear, whose debut album for Ghostly, hot on the heels of a handful of singles for Ghostly’s sublabel Spectral (in addition to records as False for M-nus and Jabberjaw for Perlon), practically reinvents the genre in a single stroke. Or make that a series of strokes. Leave Luck to Heaven tackles the Perlon-patented jitterbug chug, the post-Detroit analog patina, and the spirited pop-techno of Kompakt and Playhouse. “Dog Days,” with its singalong chorus, is one of the year’s best singles on or off the dancefloor. If you can’t get with this record, you’re not only out of heaven’s luck-in the words of track 10, “you’re fucking crazy.”
Various Schaffelfeiber 2
Kompakt’s infatuation with schaffel-that loping swing rhythm that channels polka and “Spirit in the Sky” with the same syncopated breathlessness-is as old as the label itself. Once considered techno’s awkward stepchild, it’s recently achieved broader popularity, from T.Raumschmiere’s “Monster Truck Driver” to Chicks On Speed’s “Fashion.” The Cologne label’s second comp devoted to “shuffle fever” shows how versatile the bump-and-flummox can be. While Naum and Wighnomy Bros strip it down to buzzing, jerky gestures, and Superpitcher and SCSI-9 emphasize its anti-gravity pogo qualities, The Orb explores lapping whitecaps on “Cool Harbour” and Mikkel Metal takes a seafloor moonwalk. T.Raumschmiere’s mix for Komeit finds utopia in a gliding gait, reminding, “We could come here again/without pain.”
Pete Moss In Your Dreams
East Coast DJ and producer Pete Moss makes a solid debut in the production realm with In Your Dreams, an impressive blend of stripped-down house and sensual deep sounds. Emphasizing spaced-out dubby beats, eloquent funked-out synthesizers, groove-ridden basslines and crisp, snappy snares, Moss’s music is so silky smooth, you don’t even notice he’s moved on to the next track until you’re halfway through the disc (all of the 10 original tracks are mixed like a DJ set). Moss, who has released several tracks on the Philadelphia label Ovum, produces quality house music with enough Philly-inspired soul to keep you moving on the dancefloor.
Various The Future Is My Melody
German label Elektrolux churns out a healthy amount of mellow ambient-influenced chill-out and lounge music for the R&R set, most notably the Space Night late-night TV program and its corresponding audio soundtrack. The Future Is My Melody is the debut installment of a new series, intent on showcasing the label’s dreamy, vocal-oriented pop tunes. The album is definitely intent on creating atmosphere, highlighted by the silky sparse ambiance of “Silur X Zeit” by Rescape, the luxurious vocals of Julia Messenger on PFL’s “For The Love Of You” and Jean F. Cochois’s tripped-out “Days, Weeks and Years.” There are enough moments of heady bliss here to wipe away any doubts you might have about chillout pop tunes.
Big Noyd Only the Strong
Given Noyd’s track record of enjoyable thug rap, this album could’ve easily been a guilty pleasure. Instead, Noyd comes across as a generic street prattler more often than not, typically failing to keep the proceedings enjoyable with a dose of humor ? la The Beatnuts. The real star of the show here is Alchemist, who brings potent, gritty funk on every track he does. Not to say Noyd is a disposable MC-far from it. He is more than capable of kicking some great verses. But on this album, he doesn’t do much to separate himself from the pack of dime-a-dozen dun rappers.
