Pearson Sound ‎– Pearson Sound

01 Asphalt Sparkle
02 Glass Eye
03 Gristle
04 Crank Call
05 Swill
06 Six Congas
07 Headless
08 Russet
09 Rubber Tree

David Kennedy, the Leeds producer behind Pearson Sound, has been at the vanguard of British electronic music since his first singles (under another alias, Ramadanman) back in 2006. He's had a productive and popular career to date, a dozen singles credited to Pearson Sound and another dozen as Ramadanman, and he even bested the likes of James Blake and Actress in a 2010 list at Little White Earbuds. But it's nearly a decade into his music career, and only now is Kennedy settling on his first full-length album.

For those who've followed Kennedy's work, "settling" hasn't been his specialty; he's a restless character. He came up as a dubstep producer alongside Mala, Coki and Burial, but before long began to embrace the rumbles of bass emanating beyond South London — most notably the sound of Chicago footwork. Kennedy's 2011 Fabriclive mix (credited to both Ramadanman and Pearson Sound) doubled as an overview of bass music in the new decade, ranging from dubstep escapees Burial, Pinch and Mala to the tech-house of Julio Bashmore and darker techno tones of Levon Vincent. A recent single, "Raindrops," was iridescent and ambient.

But for his debut, there's a sense of patience to Pearson Sound's productions; of not rushing toward the next new thing, but instead carefully considering each and every sound, be it thunderous or minute. (Listen to "Asphalt Sparkle" without the right speaker set-up, though, and the earth-moving bass might sound downright slight.) Pearson gets a tone so deep and resonant that it's like a seismic event beneath the otherwise anthemic synth chords, making the entire track wobble like Jello. "Crank Call" literally vibrates, but with smaller sounds, the way a phone might buzz across a tabletop. Listen more closely, and beneath the hi-hats and ghostly pads, there's more ringing, as well as a heavy breather at the other end of the line.

No matter the tempo, Pearson Sound thrills. "Glass Eye" slots into the modern bass canon, its rumbling hits offset by splashes of cymbals, tricky drum programming and snares that wobble like spinning plates. But Kennedy is just as effective making dark, stomach-churning ambient sounds, the way he does in "Gristle." The exotic hand percussion of "Six Congas" sounds at once bright and body-moving, but with a foreboding undercurrent. In spite of its title, the beat of "Rubber Tree" emits sparks like metal against metal before sliding into feedback. It's a noisy yet masterful end to a debut nearly a decade in the making...  www.npr.org

Skream - Still Lemonade EP

01 Still Lemonade
02 Still Lemonade (Redshape Remix)

Is the world ready for a Skream album on Crosstown Rebels? News that Oli Jones had signed up to the Damian Lazarus helmed label for his third studio LP probably came as a shock to many, but really it fits in well with the development in sound of Skream these past few years. Whilst full details of that LP are yet to surface, Crosstown lay down a marker of how it might sound with this Still Lemonade 12" from Skream. In original form, the track is tech house at it's most immediate and colourful and is complemented by a remix from Redshape that veers off into rhythmic abstraction nicely.. www.juno.co.uk

Hodge & Facta - Spheres of Costa Rica / Visions

01 Spheres of Costa Rica 
02 Visions

Tempa goes Bristolian with two lean and slinky riddims from Hodge & Facta. Both arrive at this 12" off the back of their strongest work, Hodge with the 'Mind Games' for Hotline and 'Amor Fati' for Dnuos Ytivil, and Facta on the 'Loveless' 12" for Idle Hands. Here, with 'Spheres Of Costa' they find a super-cooled balance of noirish chimes and humid, playfully tropical percussion for the early swingers, whereas 'Visions' is blatantly dark and moody, all Brizzle bass shifts and spiny drums worked for the 130bpm crew... www.boomkat.com

Joker - The Mainframe

01 Intro
02 Boss Mode
03 Wise Enough (Instrumental)
04 Midnight
05 An Intervening Episode
06 Lucy (Instrumental)
07 Scene 1 (Qo, NoS)
08 Scene 2 (Neon City)
09 Scene 3 (Spirit Ruins)
10 Mahogany
11 Love (Instrumental)
12 Fuzz Bop
13 Mixed Emotions

When dubstep went global, its most successful artists met a variety of fates. Some migrated to house and techno, while some stuck with an increasingly limited formula. Some, like Skream, ascended to bigger things. Others aimed just as high, and undershot spectacularly. Way back in 2008, the swaggering synths of Joker's "Gully Brook Lane" were an early indicator of the genre's stadium potential. But the tension in early Joker productions—between the austerity of dubstep and his taste for gleeful overload—didn't hold for long. Shortly after Magnetic Man showed how to make a dubstep album with pop appeal, Joker's 2011 LP The Vision got it quite badly wrong. It was grotesque and overcooked in places, but mostly it was just plain dull. 

Its followup, The Mainframe, certainly isn't that. This, perhaps, is Joker's "vision" finally realised. It's just as overblown as its predecessor—more so, even, thanks to a palette of expensive sounding orchestral plug-ins. But the vocal appearances are much more sparing, limited to unremarkable turns from Zak Abel and Rochelle, and a skeevy performance from Sam Frank on "Lucy," the album's one truly grim moment. 

Instead, the focus has shifted back onto Joker's instrumentals. The producer has described The Mainframe as a "story" that should be enjoyed "from start to finish," like a film, and for once that tired cliche is pretty accurate. The album is cinematic in sweep. There's an absurdly grandiose "Intro," and an "An Intervening Episode" whose luxurious wafts of guitar carry a hint of jazz-fusion. There are three consecutive "Scene"s guiding us through a succession of cartoon landscapes, from the steely menace of "Qo,noS" (a Star Trek reference) to the sci-fi pomp of "Neon City" and the sentimental "Spirit Ruins." The moody segues slotted between tracks are often as entertaining as the tracks themselves.

But all of this is really just embellishment. If The Mainframe is a film, then it's a Michael Bay blockbuster: slick and engaging but totally adolescent in worldview, its plot tortuous, its characters flimsily drawn, all of it an excuse for a string of eye-popping action set-pieces. When they come, they offer a pretty undeniable thrill. "Boss Mode"'s bassline crumples like a metal-on-metal impact rendered in hi-def CGI, while "Midnight" is part boogie update, part euphoric trance breakdown, and part Godzilla-sized dubstep banger. A track like "Mahogany," with its cheesy synthetic piano and searing synths, is bracingly naff, but compelling nonetheless.

Still, just as, an hour or so into Transformers 2, the adrenaline rush peters out and the clunky sentimentality starts to grate, so too does this album outstay its welcome. The title of mawkish closer "Mixed Emotions" sums it up nicely. The Mainframe feels like the album that Joker has wanted to make all along. Whether that’s a good thing is questionable... www.residentadvisor.net

J:Kenzo - Urban Gorilla

01 Urban Gorilla f. Juiceman            
02 Expansion           
03 Technoid 

Tuffened dubstep/grime hybrids from the Rinse FM DJ and producer. The tensile half-step lurch of 'Technoid' appears one side, backed with an 'Urban Gorilla' vocal version starring Juiceman, and the skippy cyber-grime styles of 'Expansion'... www.boomkat.com

Bruce - Just Getting Started / Tilikum

A1 Just Getting Started 
B1 Tilikum

True to the usual bullshit-averse attitude of his Livity Sound imprint, Peverelist is keeping background details on the producer behind this EP to a minimum. We know that this outing, for Livity Sound's sister label Dnuos Ytivil, is Bruce's debut, and that he has another coming up on Hessle Audio. Aside from that, there's an obvious desire to let the tunes do the talking here. That's fine though, because, as is generally the case with Livity and Livity-associated releases, the tunes are excellent.

"Just Getting Started" has a slightly less manic but similarly intense percussive spine as Hodge used on Dnuos Ytivil's last release, the excellent Amor Fati. A riotous hail of bass drums, toms and splintering snares, it adds various industrial wheezes and distorted screams along the way to produce a slice of rough, grainy techno. "Tilikum" has a slightly more stretched-out but no less vital feel. A bleak and restless beast, it only occasionally breaks its central emphasis on slowly thumping bass with freakout synth digressions and dense, foggy howls... www.residentadvisor.net

Bambounou - Centrum

01 Where 
02 Composer 
03 Fire Woman 
04 Excluding Natalia 
05 S.A.C. 
06 Each Other 
07 Oez 
08 At The Mirror 
09 0 To 1 

Jéremy Guindo-Zegiestowski has been a bit of a Renaissance man figure in Paris's ever-bustling dance music scene. His early work signalled an allegiance to the more UK-style, bass-heavy side of things—which earned him a regular spot in the 50WEAPONS roster starting in 2012. More recently, however, he's been moving towards house, especially with his growing role in the ClekClekBoom crew. 

50 Weapons will issue Centrum just as it handled the release of his debut album, Orbiting. Where that one was based around an idea of future life beyond earth, Centrum takes the focus back to our home planet, with a dystopian vision the press release describes as "a future where everything is in order and where no one can get out of the system." The label also states that the album takes more of a page from "ambient and techno" than the "bass and footwork influences" of the first LP... www.residentadvisor.net

Roman Flügel - Sliced Africa

1 Black Towers
2 Sliced Africa
3 Spiritual Enhancer

The venerated German producer appropriates African musics in a long-standing Teutonic tradition on his latest for Hamburg's Dial. 'Black Towers' stretches out for nearly 12 minutes of effortless, subtly shifting groove repetition and awning, earthly synth pads; 'Sliced Africa' locks down to a percolated bounce with natty keyboard melodies reminding of recent Fiedel and MMM styles, 'Spiritual Enhancer' gets off on a sort of slow-mo mix of Roedelius and old skool electro. www.boomkat.com

Andy Stott - Faith in Strangers

1 Time Away 
2 Violence 
3 On Oath 
4 Science and Industry 
5 No Surrender 
6 How it Was 
7 Damage  
8 Faith in Strangers
9 Missing

'Faith In Strangers’ was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener ‘Time Away’ featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track ‘Missing’ a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore who also appeared on 2012’s ‘Luxury Problems’. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with ‘No Surrender’- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty Warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ finds the sweet spot between RZA’s classic ‘Ghost Dog’ and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. ‘Faith in Strangers’ is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott’s mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott’s career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light. www.boomkat.com

Cooly G - Landscapes / It’s Serious

1. Landscapes (ft. Simbad)
2. It’s Serious (ft. Karizma)

Cooly G re-enters our orbit on two stellar collaborations with House allies Simbad and Karizma. Looking every bit the futurist dancefloor queen on the sleeve, it's a stone-set reassurance - if needed - of her unique prowess when it comes to sumptuous yet rudely sensuous rhythm vybz. With Simbad on 'Landscapes' she scopes a stunning scene of tucked, Gurley-esque drum programming and astro-planing synth washes graced with her silk-cut vocals. It'd almost be a disrespect not to shut your eyes when dancing to this. Equally 'ardcore debted, and ruffer still 'It's Serious', produced with Karizma, locks off a more dextrous, ruthlessly cut-up tribal shake-down, pivoting off pointillist drums and steppin' on landmine bass plosions. In other words: f**kin' lethal. Highly recommended!...www.boomkat.com

GoldFFinch - Red Mask

1. Red Mask
2. Ovale

Funked-up ElectroTech from Belgian duo, Goldffinch, rolling right off their 'Dirtybird' drop for Airflex Labs. 'Red Mask' is an intensely taut and locked-on piece of dancefloor science, carving a fluid, frictionless groove from rolling, inter-locking synthlines and robust bass synced for bodily gratification. 'Ovale' is more reserved, working a jacked-up Electrobass sound powered by metronomic subbass throbs and stickier percussion. Test these on a big rig for optimal satisfaction...www.boomkat.com

Danny Brown & Black Milk - Black and Brown

01 Sound Check
02 Wake Up
03 Loosie
04 Zap
05 Jordan VII
06 Dada
07 WTF
08 Lol
09 Dark Sunshine
10 Black & Brown

To say that Black and Brown, the new collaborative EP from Detroit indie-rap producer Black Milk and shock-rap loose cannon Danny Brown, feels "half-finished" would be over-generous. Covering 10 tracks in a scant 22 minutes and bearing a forehead-slap obvious title that probably existed before the project did, Black and Brown is hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced, and conspicuously truncated. There are two songs, back to back, titled "WTF" and "LOL". Four songs don't exceed the two-minute mark. The overwhelming impression is that the EP exists because an assistant stumbled across an "in-progress" folder of mp3s on Black Milk's desktop and leaked the results.

And yet, Black Milk is one of indie rap's best and most reliable producers, and Danny Brown, fresh off his brilliant XXX, is riding a white-hot creative streak: which means that Black and Brown is 22 hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced minutes of vivid beats and incredible rapping. Black Milk's beats are boilerplate Black Milk-- post-Dilla instrumentals hitched to hard-knocking drums-- and Brown brings none of the songwriting skill or emotional range that marked XXX, with its tales of stripping hot water heaters from abandoned houses and harrowing accounts of substance abuse. It's a low-stakes affair, aiming at nothing more than head nods, but it induces some deep ones.

Brown tamps down the keening high edge in his voice, with the result that he sounds more like Pharaohe Monch than usual. Lyrically, he mostly coasts, but even on autopilot he remains absurdly quotable. "Morphine metaphors make you do the shoulder lean," he spits on "Loosie", and the line is a finely tuned mini-marvel of alliteration and craft. Few rappers are as creatively disgusting as Brown-- his missing tooth is "perfect for lickin clits," he informs a potential partner-- but even his shock raps hit their target, more often than not, through some deft bit of linguistic three-card Monte: "Used to make out with runaways in crack houses/ Now I run away from making out with brick houses," he leers on "Loosie". Got that?

Black Milk's production, meanwhile, continues his career-long argument for the power of immacuately prepared comfort food. His work gathers a lot of strength from old-fashioned flipped samples, but the sound he wrings from them is compellingly tactile, as if the samples were made of some dense-but-yielding material only he knows how to manipulate. His drums have so much character and texture they almost seem to hit twice; "Zap"'s bone-jarring backbeat lands somewhere indistinct in headphone-space, over a feebly quavering mini-choir of chipmunk-soul voices, and it sounds like you could reach out and run your fingers over it. Milk switches the beat up every one or two minutes, like impatient channel flicking, which both reinforces the beat-tape feeling of Black and Brown and handily keeps it from getting boring. The whole EP is over seemingly as soon as it begins and is the definition of a simple A+B proposition, right down to its name. But it works, and if it means there's a more considered full-length from these two on the way, even better...www.pitchfork.com

Real Estate - Days

1 Easy
2 Green Aisles
3 It's Resl
4 Kinder Blumen
5 Out of Tune
6 Municipality
7 Wonder Years
8 Three Blocks
9 Younger Than Yesterday
10 All The Same

For a mix of songs made at different times, Real Estate's self-titled 2009 debut was impressively consistent. Given how well the New Jersey band fused disparate moments, you had to figure they could reach even greater heights were they to craft their next set all at once. They did just over the last winter, and the result is indeed a step forward. Cleaner, sharper, and just plain stronger, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements-- a suite of subtle variations on a theme.

Its coherence sounds remarkably effortless, as if stringing together catchy gems is as easy as, in the words of one song, "floating on an inner tube in the sun." Interestingly, Real Estate actually acknowledge this sense of ease. The opener is bluntly titled "Easy", and references to carefree simplicity abound. As singer/guitarist Martin Courtney puts it, "If it takes all summer long/ Just to write one simple song/ There's too much to focus on/ Clearly there is something wrong." But the band's celebration of the uncomplicated is less about how Days was written than about the beauty of life seen in retrospect, especially young life in small towns.

Like the stirring scenes of suburban Texas in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, these songs find meaning in daily mundanities-- in houses and gardens, phone lines and street lights, names carved in trees and leaves pressed by footsteps. "All those wasted miles/ All those aimless drives through green aisles," sings Courtney wistfully. "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." That sentiment was evident on the band's debut, but here they've honed it to its essence.

The music bears a simplicity to match. These aren't minimal songs by any means, but the layers of cycling guitar, rolling rhythm, and gentle echo are always understated, more about conveying feeling than showing off the band's considerable chops. There's also a smooth efficiency in these rich tunes. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Much of this precision comes from guitarist Matt Mondanile, whose nimble playing adds color to each song's shape. It's most noticeable in the insistent "It's Real", but I'm even more taken with his sonic smoke rings in "Out of Tune", and how his shimmering guitar evokes sunrays mingling through branches and sparkling off pools.

That idyllic tone permeates Days, and in lesser hands could deprive it of tension or variety. But Real Estate have such a knack for classic-sounding melody that every song quickly engages on a musical gut level. It's a quality their music shares with the jangly hooks of early R.E.M., the breeziness of later Pavement, and the garage twang of the Fresh & Onlys. But their closest kin are New Jersey forefathers the Feelies. That group's undying ability to mine repeated chords and Zen phrases is matched best by the album's closer, "All the Same", a looping study of how night and day are merely sides of the same coin. Lasting over seven minutes, it might be Real Estate's first epic. But it's as subtle and unassuming as anything on Days-- more evidence from this band that great music doesn't have to sound hard to make, even if it is...www.pitchfork.com

Rangers - Pan Am Stories

01. Zombies (Day)
02. Zeke's Dream
03. Sacred Cows
04. John Is The Last Of A Dying Breed
05. Bronze Casket
06. Jane's Well
07. Zombies (Night)
08. Luncheon Ghana
09. Khyber Pass
10. Podunk Baal
11. Conversations On The Jet Stream
12. The Mule
13. Bad Flan

After clocking up huge plaudits from Fact Magazine, The Wire, SImon Reynolds and Altered Zones for their 'Suburban Tours' release, Rangers arrives on Not Not Fun with his 2nd album proper, 'Pan Am Stories'. The mind-child of one Joe Knight, Rangers deal in especially evocative soft-psych charms which share a clear love of '80s MOR culture with James Ferraro and Ducktails. It's reflective of the music most Americans (we'd imagine) have absorbed by some kind of as-yet-unidentified radiopathic osmosis; the soul-absorption of thousands of criss-crossing radio transmissions beaming 24 hour soft rock and cable stations emitting unending re-runs of mood-manipulating TV theme music and vibes. But most crucially Joe's music has filtered only those most warbly, hooky parts and sifted out the cloying earnestness of so much coffee table Americana, yet retained its sun-smacked and soulful intentions. And it's the sly, wry glaze of electronics and occasional overblown noise which gets warped in transmission that does it for us, an empathic hypnagogic affect which translates to European tastes very well. If there's anything to distinguish this album from the last, there's perhaps a more blown-out grunginess, not in terms of fidelity, which is actually higher here, but just a burnt twilight tone which feels moodier and more autumnal than say the last Ducktails, and like a pop refined version of Ferraro's immense 'Last American Hero'...www.boomkat.com

Water Borders - Harbored Mantras

01. Tread On Them
02. What Wiwant
03. waldenpond.com
04. Bad Ethos
05. Even In The Dark
06. Feasting On Mongeese
07. See Bank
08. Miners
09. Antechamber

Another compelling entry from Tri Angle Records, who've cleverly snapped up the frightening debut album by Water Borders. With 'Harbored Mantras' the San Fran-hailing duo of Amitai and Loric use the rhythms of contemporary ritual dance music to resurrect the occult soul of Coil and their cabal in unique and succinctly pop balanced new forms. A couple of mixtapes - both self-released and for the brilliant DIS magazine - display their influences quite clearly, working in a circle of influence ranging from Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's eerie Threshold HouseBoys Choir to James Blake's chamber pop and the rhythm schematics of Doc Daneeka or DJ Elmoe, and it's fair to say this album sums up all of those and more. The opening palette cleanser 'Tread On Them' crosses swords between gamelan, narcotically-blunted House and a deeply uncanny channelling of Jhonn Balance-like vocals, whose inspiration looms large into the stunning 'What Wiwant', practically scratching at the hairs of the neck with vocal anguish over the tuffest 'ardcore subs and clammiest ambience. We could happily play this on repeat this until the national grid shut down. That chilling vocal continues to pervade deeper in, with 'Bad Ethos' summoning depth charge Bristolian Dubstep in a tableau of sneering choirs and poltergeist shrieks, and to sour effect on 'Even In The Dark' and the 'Feasting On Mongeese', beautifully sustaining the aura of affected gothic torment. In the closing rites, this poise is held to elegant effect in the sepulchral space of 'Seed Bank', MIDI sax bleat circling abyssal 808 bass hits, and to exotic infusions of 'Antechamber' leaving us to dreams of grotesquerie even Pasolini would be proud of...www.boomkat.com

Ursula Bogner - Sonne = Blackbox

01. Sonne = Blackbox
02. Jubiläum
03. Nach Europa
04. Trabant
05. Or Dor Melanor
06. Uranotypie
07. Strahlungen
08. Der Chor Der Oktaven
09. Illusorische Planeten
10. Permutationen
11. Shepard Monde
12. Signalfluss
13. Homöostat
14. Refrain für einen Formanten
15. De Planetarum Influxu
16. Liner Notes

Germany's answer to Daphne Oram or Raymond Scott - or more likely an elaborate wind-up perpetrated by Jan Jelinek, on whose Faitiche label her "archive" recordings sporadically appear - Ursula Bogner is back. Whether or not it's Jelinek behind the Bogner corpus (and I think by now we know the answer to that), there's no disputing the consistently brittle beauty, dizzying complexity and easy charm of her radiophonic constructions. You certainly get a lot of Bogner for your buck on Sonne = Blackbox, with 15 tracks showcasing her brand of primitive electronic composition and tape manipulation. On 'Or Dor Melanor', 'Shepard Monde' and the title track, Broadcast and Stereolab immediately come to mind, while the eerie synthetic ramble of 'Trabant' is like the Ghost Box crew relocated from Belbury to Berlin. There are killers throughout: 'Signalfluss' and particularly 'Uranotypie' with its combo of droning, minimal electronics and Teutonic spoken voice, sound like vital cold wave (cold war?) artefacts, while the playful, impish quality of 'Der Chor Der Oktaven' and 'Permutationen' (before it lapses into a kind of slanted techno groove) invoke the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's John Baker and Delia Derbyshire. If there's a dead giveaway that this is Jelinek's work through and through, it's the heaviness of the sub-bass and the attendant dub-head's sense of space, both hard to imagine in late 60s and early 70s Germany. Whatever you want to believe, make no mistake, this is a truly delightful collection of off-kilter electronic music and quite simply a must for all dedicated heads...www.boomkat.com

Nils Frahm - Felt

1. Keep
2. Less
3. Familiar
4. Unter
5. Old Thought
6. Snippet
7. Kind
8. Pause
9. More

There's a very literal reason for the title of Nils Frahm's new album, Felt. He wanted to play the piano during the dead of night, without disturbing his neighbours, so he layed thick felt in front of its strings to muffle the sound. Rather than being frustrated, he unexpectedly found himself enchanted by this dampened sound, and it opened up new compositional as well as playing possibilities for his inquisitive mind. The resulting work is varied in style but it all has a close, confessional, nocturnal quality that's beautifully wrought and expertly recorded: from the Reich-a-like layered arpeggios of 'Keep' and 'More', to the wistful, jazz-tinted Glassisms of 'Familiar', there are plenty of grand harmonic gestures, but these are nicely
interspersed with, and balanced by, eerie ambiences like 'Pause' and 'Less'. Really lovely music for the arriving Autumn days, and recommended for fans of Machinefabriek, Isan and other masters of subtly romantic electro-acoustic sonorities...www.boomkat.com

Soul Clap Social Experiment 002

1. Lee Foss - Foxy
2. James Teej - Galaktik Option
3. Miguel Campbell - Kiss & Tell
4. Nightplane - Parallel Lines
5. Teeloo - Sooo Oooh
6. Soho 808 - Just To See
7. Jonny White - Rainsong (Rainbeats)

Soul Clap are a DJ/production duo from Boston, which is notable only because Boston would probably finish somewhere between third and fifth in a straw poll of "least techno-y cities in America." Nonetheless, Cnyce and Elyte have been stirring there for several years now, releasing a handful of singles and edits as well as venturing out on a few tours. Social Experiment 002, both the first commercially available mix the duo has produced and the first mix on Art Department's Jonny White's No. 19 Music label, should kickstart a busy year for Soul Clap. (Social Experiment will be proceeded quickly by a DJ Kicks mix Soul Clap created with New York up-and-comers Wolf + Lamb.) While Soul Clap are arguably the most visible electronic artists from Boston in some time, one thing they are not is a harbinger of a new or exciting style or scene; their success as DJs (and producers/remixers) is predicated on an elegant, elastic mix of house and techno.

Soul Clap are also not classicists: Social Experiment mostly features tracks from young East Coast and European producers. They're kin to DJs like Seth Troxler and Wolf + Lamb in their sly funkiness and preference for making folks dance over making a statement. Social Experiement is not an exercise in momentum, studied repetition, or steadily building toward a climax. They favor quick-striking, vocally oriented tracks over tension and release. Nothing here qualifies as an anthem: even the most melodic tracks tend to be self-contained, or seem so in this context. To borrow a sports term, Soul Clap "play within themselves," never reaching for catharsis or exultation. The mix picks up quickly-- the brief cuts that dominate the early minutes are smart-- and stays tense and alive throughout.

That might make Social Experiment sound easy or even pandering, but Soul Clap avoid those trappings. There's plenty of challenging, off-kilter music here. It's just that Soul Clap are particularly adept at spinning it into warmhearted, bright-eyed jams. SECT's "H.T.A.D." is a lurching acid-bass track but any lingering salty aftertaste is exploded by Michael J Collins' whooshing, Kraut -y "Schizotypal" (and then extending the bliss with Night Plane's "Parallel Lines"). They swing the reverse trick too, leading Benoit & Sergio's silky pop-house track, "Principles", blindfolded into Tanner Ross' "4 U", a choppy, psychedelic churn. Clashes like these provide the tiny combustions that keep Social Experiment rolling.

Social Experiment is a mix without an obvious agenda. It sounds like it wants to make me dance, but it's not pushy. It's not a label showcase or a genre exercise; the only two summary descriptions I can really pin on it are "fresh" (most artists here are relatively new to the scene) and "North American" (for its creators and their choices: Art Department, Benoit & Sergio, Jimmy Edgar, Lee Foss, Seth Troxler, and Nightplane, among others, hail from this side of the Atlantic). All of this makes Social Experiment 002 unlikely to represent anything more specific than "Hey, Soul Clap: pretty good!" a year from now, but asking for anything more from a mix so contented and hardworking seems in poor taste...www.pitchfork.com

James Blake - Enough Thunder EP

1. Once We All Agree
2. We Might Feel Unsound
3. Fall Creek Boys Choir (With Bon Iver)
4. A Case Of You
5. Not Long Now
6. Enough Thunder

Brand new six-track EP, an addendum of sorts to James Blake's widely-acclaimed debut album. Most notably 'Enough Thunder' contains his sought-after 'Fall Boys Creek' collaboration with Bon Iver, and his cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case Of You' recorded for Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show, but for us the best moment is found in the Footwork-inspired fusioneering of 'We Might Feel Unsound'. It also includes three other new songs 'Once We All Agree', 'Not Long Now' and 'Enough Thunder'...www.boomkat.com

Tickles - Call 4 Backup

1. Call 4 Backup
2. Da Growler
3. Crater Face
4. Zombie

Surefire Funky 'floor shakers from the Tickles production unit. 'Call 4 Backup's a bit of a beast, working the simple but deadly formula of Dutch Rave synths and infectious Funky swing, while 'Da Growler' tucks into a more percolatin' sort of dutty ruffige, and 'Crater Face' piles in with roguish bleeps and hardcore drum programming for the get down. Tip for the Funky fiends!...www.boomkat.com