Todd Hutlock
Radio Slave – Weeeze [Rekids]
The Orb – Assassin (The Chocolate Hills of Bohol Mix) [Big Life/Wau! Mr. Modo]
Thomas Brinkmann - Questionary About Luck [Max.Ernst]
Kiki – Trust Me – [Bpitch Control]
Model 500 – Neptune [R&S]
Sleeparchive – Diagnosis [Sleeparchive]
Jeff Mills – Final Night of Ambient Light [Axis]
Martin Circus – Disco Circus [Prelude]
Audio Werner – Onandon [Perlon]
Linton Kwesi Johnson – It Noh Funny/Funny Dub [Island]

Michael F. Gill
Jerome & Jamie Anderson - Rotated [100% Pure]
Mock & Toof – Lycra Virgin [Empty Edits]
Clubheroes – Nothing But Net [Elektro.Komfort]
Brothomstates vs Blamstrain – Envelope Diving 2 [Narita]
The Hasbeens – Make the World Go Away [Clone]
Lil’ Devious – Come Home (Dave Clarke Remix) [Rulin]
DJ Overdose & Mr. Pauli - Atomizame Lentamente [Original Street Techno Recordings]
Parliament – I Misjudged You [Casablanca]
Stargaze – You Can’t Have It [TNT Unlimited Inc./Brooktown Records]
Alonzo Turner - Whoever Said It [LA Records]

Peter Chambers: Maybe it’s the bodginess of my radar, but from a distant observer’s perspective, the rise and rise of Loco Dice seems as sudden as it is phenomenal: this guy has appeared to come from the margins as a DJ and producer to emerge as one of the key sculptors of the mnml microverse in eighteen months. Little wonder, given the material here. Hardwax’s oft-caned expression “long tripping” has found its true home with these four monstrously long shimmying and shimmering drumathons. It’s all percussion here, tuned percussion. Despite the emphasis on mesmeric melodies, every element in Dice’s tracks serves the groove. “Raindrops on my Window” and “A Chico A Rhytmico” (the standout) remind this listener of Guido Schneider’s productions, but purged of all their tricks and trapdoors. Here it’s all a slow evolution - a long road to nowhere, but one that should also work well in the mix and serve the inchoate philosophical statement that Cadenza seems to be stating again and again, with endless drums in their grooves and pretty flowers on their sleeves.

Nick Sylvester: This one seems a classic case of producer X having no clue what producers Y and Z (and A and B) are putting into their tracks, what structures they’re envisioning, what nutmeat is at the tracks’ cores, and then doing his best to approximate. Yeah, all four tracks here sorta sound like variations on the hollowed out “lots of peripheral percussion clouding around one barely-there synth-riff kinda-melody” that Villalobos and Luciano et al. were doing to acclaim the last two years, with all the slurps and ghostly flute flutters and clicks and squeaks and clatters, but none of these LD tracks have the right melody for the job. It’s either too bright and comfortable (”Raindrops On My Window”), too ethereal (”Vamos”) or too middling, too have-it-both-ways (”Paradiso”). The best wriggly tech-house (do we still say k-house?) has melodies that are either barely there or just so completely bizarre, so unpredictable, that they just work (e.g. Melchior’s “Different Places”). In fairness “Paradiso” isn’t half-bad, since the arpeggiating melody has this stringy timbre to it, and as the percussion grooves more obviously as the track progresses, LD also adds in a few extra sub-bass wrinkles to speed along the melody. Either way, there’s a cautionary tale aspect to this release, which is (a) the Compositional Stuff That Matters still actually matters, and (b) detailwork only takes one so far.

Cadenza / CADENZA 13
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Nublu Recs doubles as this pretty slick bar in Alphabet City NYC, serving as homebase for label ops and a performance space for most of their kinda-jazz, kinda-dub, kinda-afropunk, kinda-funk NY-based acts, the best of which is this here three-piece Kudu. Frontwoman Sylvia Gordon has these massive firelined pipes—we know that from “Bar Star” and other burners from Death of the Party—but when the words come out her mouth on “Playing House” she’s smooth operating. I mean, totally frenzied as usual, but there’s something sweet and sirenic about it too. It works well with the song, which has got a propulsive afro-punk vs. trip-hop beat whose soaring figures atop will remind old people of Siouxsie and young people of theSTART!. Remember theSTART!? Christ.

Given the track’s “heavy stomp with lots of stuttering percussion in the background” routine, I’m not surprised the DFA’s Juan Maclean and Eric Broucek abstracted it into hard techno. The duo give Gordon’s vocals the hiccup loop treatment not unlike what Kompakt’s the Field is making a killing off of, and if you can get behind that warm synth loop, there are all these IDM twinkles that remind me of early Mouse On Mars. The Lopazz Remix further contorts Gordon’s vocals, cuts them up, and sprinkles them among stuttering claps and a steady round thump—it’s OK but, for better/worse, not the go-to.

Nublu / NUB 12005
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[Nick Sylvester]

Can you say “Dad-house?” I’ve long been a fan of Davis’ soulful, often spiritual Chicago house, but here he seems a bit creatively spent, detouring towards the lounge with an abundance of smooth jazz saxophone, tepid percussion, and easy, nagging hooks that repeat without much sense of development. This is a bit surprising considering Davis’ recent albums Water for Thirsty Children and Chicago Forever found him comfortably easing into a mature mix of uplifting R&B, soul, and house. What’s worse: if one were to listen to this single blindfolded, you’d surely think the included Andre Harris remix was the most authentic Davis production of the bunch.

Large Music / LAR-107
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[Michael F. Gill]

Rude 66 (aka Ruud Lekx) has made a name for himself over the last decade producing dark acid and vintage machine electro for the Dutch label Bunker. “Strings of Death,” his latest single, sharpens his pop edge a bit, with two vocoder tracks that play heavily into the mystique of sci-fi italo and disco. The sickly sweet “Break the Silence” could probably only be made in such a conscious era of revivalism, but taken as is, it’s the best Daft Punk/Data 80 hybrid I’ve heard all year, with a transparent sheen that rivals the best production work by either of those two artists. Balancing things out is “A Message from Heaven,” where an industrial-like gloom enclose a speech by a preacher in South Carolina warning everyone to repent and prepare for the second coming of God. What’s peculiar is this preacher naturally speaks in very even segments, rarely altering the tone of his voice, and tells his message in such a methodical way you’d think he was just reading it out of a book. How appropriate though, for an EP focused on robots and machines.

Vynalogica / Vynalogica 09
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[Michael F. Gill]

Download

01: 2020 Soundsystem – Tape (12” Edit)
02: Audision – Vanish (Sascha Funke Mix)
03: Plasmik - Ahead
04: Mike Uzzi and Ben Recht – Talk You Down
05: Tiga – 3 Weeks (Troy Pierce Move Until You Leave Mix)
06: Skat - Nightwalk
07: Klein & Zenker – Delusion
08: Partial Parts - Trauermusik

Luciano is an artist with three faces; his work either aims at melodically rich kaleidelectro pop [as on the marvellous “Capricciosa” EP on Bruchstuecke], epic mnml on Cadenza, or slamming, stripped back, percussive techno business on his live and DJ releases. This “For Disco Only” release, as the name suggests, falls into the third category, and is some of his best work in ages in this mode. The A-side is a long, tripping, rolling batteria of drums with a lightly placed female vocal, care of Mercedes Sosa. It’s not nearly as dramatic as his mix of Salif Keita’s “Yamoré,” but it has a wonderful playability and the same bouncing drumfunk that distinguishes his studied, careful minimalism from the lazy Abeltonitis of other less talented producers. The B-side adds a great male vocal [ed. note: from Pharrell!], this time with strong “soulful house” overtones and a slight hip-hop sensibility, a little like Jay Haze’s “Soul in a Bottle” set adrift and swinging its way toward Santiago. This being a bootleg, availability might be an issue, but if you can get your hands on a copy, you’d be well advised. This is the goods.

For Disco Only / 430 U
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[Peter Chambers]

A high-school friend of mine once quipped, without intended hyperbole: “Did you know Shellac is a hobby band? Imagine: if they went full-time, the music would be so good, it would kill you.” Without forcing a comparison few artists could withstand, Audision have always occupied a similar space in my soundmap—there’s something so wonderful about their music, and years after other releases have begun to sound stale, tracks like “Gamma Limit” and “First Contact” have slowly found a permanent space in my box. How is it that these guys aren’t famous? Well, maybe it’s that, like Shellac, Audision also seem to be a hobby of sorts, with their releases trickling out without fanfare at the rate of one a year or so. Having explained all that, it has to be said that this isn’t exactly an Audision record, but a remix of their “Vanish” by Sascha Funke and another piece by the unknown (to me at least) IVF. Funke’s remix of Audision begins like a new school take on the old, not unlike some of Prosumer’s recent tracks for Mobilee or 240 volts, but then the synth melody calls the tune, humming a delayed melancholy through metallic filters, you can almost hear the sound of the original’s heavy mood evaporating into a dark lightness. IVF’s contribution follows in the same blue vein, tapping some of Pantha du Prince’s recent material on the (cold) shoulder. If you’re a fan of Hanseatic gloom & the depths of minimal deepness, this is another wonderful EP from the slowest working masters of the mood.

&nd / andmusic 0 10
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[Peter Chambers]

20:20 Soundsystem made electro/disco/house for years before Get Physical made it hot. Their pristine, squeaky clean sounds and lines belie a dancefloor muscularity that only seems to come to the fore when the floor is dark and the moon is high in the sky. Likewise, Ralph Lawson’s label 20:20 Vision has always sat easily between its sometimes-brilliant electro-leaning output by Carl Finlow and its housier offerings like Fred Everything’s fruity “Light of Day.” This massive remix project is another well-considered move, pairing the original with Dirt Crew and Prins Thomas. Dirt Crew’s sound sits perfectly here as the “filthy other” to 2020’s sparkles, while Prins Thomas takes a pinch of the same grime and flings it into hyperspace disco mode. To tell the truth, the original is no masterpiece—it’s one of those tracks which stays in your box for its qualities as a “gear changer,” the B-side between A and C, useful for moving a house set into electro mode or vice versa. Dirt Crew’s mix smears a little disco mud on the original licks, but ends up underwhelming—it’s the Prins Thomas you want. All three versions, even the seemingly throwaway “bogus bonus version” prove yet again why this Norwegian is justly touted as one of the most creative productive forces in current dance music.

20:20 Vision / VIS137 / VIS137-A
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[Peter Chambers]

Another three-tracker here (the triad EP and the album-length single seem to be one of the unspoken agendas of 2006 techno), this time it’s ropy electro-tech from long-serving label-head and tech-guru Thomas P. Heckmann. This is pungent stuff, but a bit minimal for my tastes—though, unlike much of what gets hit with that label, it’s far from boring, and develops quite nicely as it plays out. Consider it set-building material of the highest order, then: propulsive, intriguing lines of percussion and synth that builds and builds but never quite explodes. “Tangents” plays the middle ground, somewhere between Detroit tech and light-handed electro. “Medusa” is a bit more of a stormer—I would plop it in between a more anthemic BPitch track and something from Clone, or perhaps a classic Italo instrumental. “Strobe” is decidedly warm and stirringly-layered, more of a home-listening track but still tasty for an early dancefloor. Quality tracks that get better and better with each listen.

BPitch Control / BPC 140
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[Mallory O’Donnell]