na: electronic!

Three new ones for the club, three new ones for the home.

Loco Dice - 7 Dunham Place

Loco Dice’s new album is inspired by its recording sessions, done in New York at – you guessed it – 7 Dunham Place. Along with Martin Buttrich, the producer took a working vacation to the NYC and crafted this massive full-length, which will probably be one of the bigger electronic records of this year among raver types. For those just dipping a toe in, though, I’d recommend checking out “La Esquina” to see if you want to check out more. For those who want the one song that will be played everywhere, but isn’t at all like anything else on the record, grab “Pimp Jackson Is Talking Now!!!”

Phill Niblock - Touch Food

This 2003 record is one for the drone fans in the crowd. Niblock is a New York avant-garde artist who works here with other giants in the field like pianist Reinhold Friedl, clarinetist Carol Robinson, saxophonist Ulrich Krieger and Kaspar T. Toeplitz on electric bass. If there were ever an album where the song samples aren’t going to help you one bit, this might be it. Music to get lost in.

Kelley Polar - Entropy Reigns EP

None other than remixer extraordinaire Ewan Pearson and co-conspirator Al Usher take a crack at the one conceivable club jam from Kelley Polar’s latest and…it totally works. The duo don’t do much to the original, for the most part, but expertly tease out the parts and build it into an epic. Also worth your download credit: Caribou’s eleven minute deconstruction of “We Live in an Expanding Universe.” No genre tag will do it justice, so let’s just say that he makes it into something very Caribou-like.

Vladislav Delay - Anima

My good friend from college loves this record more than any other Delay offering. He’s also training to be a musicologist, so I don’t trust his taste one bit. That being said, this is one time that he was completely right. Basically an hour-long avant dub mood piece, Anima is kind of like the aural equivalent of the “Mystify” Windows Screen Saver on Quaaludes. Always shifting, always interesting, this release totally justifies the hype around Delay. I can pretty confidently say that, seven years on, nothing sounds like this still.

Hrdvsion - Playing for Keeps

I’m highlighting this one simply because of the awesome Mole remix, which takes Hrvdsion’s techno original and fashions it into a hypnotic eleven minute epic. One of my favorite producers at the moment.

Philip Jeck - Sand

Resident Advisor’s Daniel Bates described some of this record thusly:

Sand is quite possibly [Jeck's] best work and definitely his most intense album to date. He reaches unprecedented levels of ferocity on the three tracks which make use of horns. “Fanfares Over,” in particular is enormously uplifting. I’ve never been inside a pan of water when it’s being slowly boiled, but I imagine that’s what the first half of the song sounds like. The second half morphs into what sounds like a loop of an aeroplane going overhead, which inflates further and further as fanning synths swarm. By the end of the track I realised I spent the entire 11 minutes staring at a tree.

I’m sold.