Never mind those voyages to the planets of rainbows and winged amazons that countless prog-bands heard from their Moog synthesizers. It is an instrument of dork camp, and synth-pop icon Jean Jacques Perrey will back me up on that. Perrey and IDM maven Luke Vibert previously made excellent comrades in “You Moog Me,” where their vintage ‘60s lounge-pop vacationed under a Martian sky lit with star showers and criss-crossing flying saucers. Their new excursions in acid techno sadly lacks some of the same spark. “Moog Acid 138″ is a decent, acid-techno treatment of carousel melodies that get overwhelmed by a blaring traffic jam of irritating synth yowls. The snappier “Moog Acid 133″ gets larded by too many abrupt synth wonks, garbled vocoder mutterings, and erratic turntable scratching. The remix by Jackson and His Computer Band thankfully gets the blood flowing: he slaps together an erratic, noisecore-meets-Billy Joel’s “Pressure” groove. Plastician’s remix strips everything down to a steady rhythm that slaps both cheeks of the face, while traces of the original Moog track buzzes like a mosquito caught in the ear. Now that’s a fitting tribute to the legend of Perrey.

LoEB / LOEB 001
[Listen]
[Cameron Macdonald]

The extended dance remix makes a welcome reappearance on the second from the still wondrous Orchestra of Bubbles. “Way Out,” gets a loving elongation that is, yes, more danceable, and also stretches out the great bleepity bloops that got compressed in the album edit. It’s casual Friday at the meat-packing plant for Robag Wrumhe’s mix, a loose-limbed romp through mechanistic EBM beats and the sound of power systems failing. But this release is one worth buying for the b-sides alone—”Rotary” ups the BPMs yet preserves a sense of calm, buffeted all the while by Ellen’s trademark moody synthetics. “Sleepless,” on the other hand, is a stunner, with a slithering Allien vocal (think Annie in her sultry mode or early Bjork) contrasted by some zither-plucking action and the rising, then falling patterns of drums and waveforms.

BPitch Control / BPC 129
[Mallory O’Donnell]

As one of the first producers to return to the sounds that made up early Italo-disco Alden Tyrell was one of the few modern artists to feature on I-F’s influential Mixed Up in the Hague, the mix which sent diggers to the crates to scrabble for previously dismissed early-80s electronic disco and producers to their equipment to try to recreate it. Times Like These gathers on CD some of the best of his past work and a few new tracks. Tyrell’s post–house and techno take on Italo is trackier, more explicitly electro dance-floor functional than the trashy, wannabe commercial originals but still works best when it retains at least vestigial attachment to song form. On “Love Explosion 05”, a vocal rework of a track from ’99, old school Italoid Fred Ventura emotes soft-rock sweet nothings over filtered white-noise snares and hi-hats. It sounds as cheap as the sentiment. The other vocal guest, Nancy Fortune, brings the over-enunciated second language English to the motorik space dust of “La Voix.” “Knockers” compares and contrasts the ever-present synth arpeggios with cyclic tom tom rolls and fills. I ad-lib lyrics about being a sultry time-travelling space woman over the Liaisons Dangereuses percussion of “Phaze Me” but that’s only in the privacy of my own room. You might just want to dance instead; I strongly recommend it.

Clone / C#cd7
[Listen]
[Patrick McNally]

The CVs of the duo who comprise Motor, Mr. No (Olivier Grasset) and Bryan Black, includes programming for Prince at Paisley Park, multiple collaborations with Felix Da Housecat, and membership in the City Rockers/International Deejay Gigolos group XLover. From this you might expect Motor’s LP to be splashy, trashy post-electroclash fun but the record’s appearance on Novamute should disabuse you of that notion. Motor is electroid techno stripped-to-the-bone, flayed-raw, and then pumped up with the cartoon machismo of EBM, especially on the vocal tracks, one of which goes so far as to feature Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb. “Sweatbox” is a bass heavy acid line, reverbed out biscuit tin snare tattoos, a kick drum, and little else. The grubby arpeggios of “Black Powder” threaten to break under their own weight as they become increasingly distorted and twisted. On “Botox,” programmed rock drums flange into the ether whilst bit-crushed guitar-substitutes brings in pretty much the only high end on the album. A little too monotone, low-end obsessed, and one-dimensionally sleazy to convince over the full hour (“Hey man, have you got any gak?” asks the track “Yak,” like the punchline to a 2003 Popbitch mailout) but in small doses, and at high volume, this is invigorating.

Novamute / 170
[Patrick McNally]

As the old saying goes, you wait a year for a new Bangkok Impact track and all of a sudden here come two. OK, maybe only this and the Robotnick remix but I’m thankful all the same. Like most of his tracks, “111″ takes a minute to build, then flogs the Hell out of the dancefloor with a combo of boot-shaking disco junkyard percussion and fast, bass-heavy electro beats. Savas Pascalidis plays to form on a typically cold Teutonic number that pleases but fails to satisfy, sounding like an excerpt from his genre-constrained last album.

Lektro Luv / 001
[Mallory O’Donnell]

One of the chief instigators in the early development of electro and electro-funk in the UK, Greg Wilson is not only a veteran DJ and remixer, but is also interested in preserving the origins and evolution of disco and electro in the UK. His fabulous website traces the roots of electro-funk through Wilson’s own interviews, recollections, and playlists, while also offering articles on the legacy and history of UK electro and electro-funk. It’s truly a labor of love.

You may be familiar with last year’s Credit To The Edit, Wilson’s wonderful CD of Disco/Electro/Boogie re-edits that came out last year on Tirk. If you haven’t heard it, or if you are thirsty for more, Wilson’s has just launched a monthly radio show called Time Capsule, which is a monthly showcase of records that Wilson has played when he first started DJing. Each edition comes with a fully detailed description of the tracks played, and plans to cover a month in the life of disco and electro, starting from December of 1975 and moving on from there. Needless to say, the archives of the show should become a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history and evolution of dance music.

[Michael F. Gill]